Its not Google vs Bing, Google vs Yahoo, or Google vs DuckDuckGo. Its Google vs Google:
Web Publishing = Google. New blog coming soon. As I start to push toward 30 years old, its time to start writing stuff that will last. I like long term business models and that is what I will talk about.
It is a tough time to be a web publisher.
Google’s alteration of Google Images sent publisher’s Image search referrals plummeting by 75%+. There is little doubt that mid double digit percentages of search users fail to realize that “Image may be subject to copyright” photos are indeed copyright. This is a plus for Google’s brand, as long as the user isn’t looking at graphic crime scene photos or hardcore porn.
Google’s Images changes was just a test to see how publisher’s and content owners would react.
Why even leave Google.com to view a search result? What started as jumbo-thumbnail previews of page content is now moving to the page itself. While Wikipedia’s licensing enables this particular example free of legal ambiguity, Google’s intentions thanks to a little caching notice seem explicit.
This inline “cache” is fully viewable at the following URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=haskell&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#itp=open4&norc=1 (set an iPhone useragent to view, or look on your phone.)
What Google is doing means not only does a potential visitor have to click your result on the SERP (page title launches inline cached view), they have to click on another link on your page itself before they actually make it to your page. Ouch! Given the brazenness of the Google Images changes, count this now obscure Wikipedia change to be applied everywhere.
Google’s behavior is aggressive. The legal boundaries for content ownership are being pushed. For pure content publishers the future does not look pretty.
There is good news. Google is shutting down enough of their own products that we can now predict whats next.
This means that a worry that Google will simply eliminate market after market of premium service by releasing a competitor for free is passing. When Google acquired Urchin and rolled out Google Analytics it looked like the market for web site statistics software was dead. Today a wide ecosystem of powerful commercial platforms exist from Mixpanel to KISSmetrics. Others, such as CrazyEgg perform very specific functions. As Google continues to tighten its internal focus which replacing its own internal content with ads, innovative third party tools will thrive.
Secondly, common users are becoming more distrustful of Google in the first place. Once only paranoid affiliate marketers worried that an IP mix up would result in an Adwords account avoided Google’s services. Today, core users are getting cold feet after the execution of Google Reader and unwanted modifications to Gmail’s UI. Doubt about the longevity of a given service makes companies dedicated solely to a single product look more appealing, even when they are pay-for-use.
The way visitors end up at your web site is changing. Google+ and YouTube are turning in to platforms where us, the middle men, will be removed. If we don’t personally create content we serve of little value. In the past, monetizing users aggressively enabled rapid scaling through direct response marketing. In the very near future Google is going to want you to pay for every single visit.
This is certainly the ending of an era not just for publishers, but for all content businesses.
When I was a kid, internet chat rooms were huge. It was just how you met new people on your computer. Before Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and (gasp) AIM, there was chat. It came in different forms, IRC being one, but it was chat. Now Google thinks if you are looking for chat rooms you are probably just looking for porn. Notice I am not logged in, and could be anyone (same thing on my phone.)
I double checked with one of my friends just to make sure there wasn’t something weird going on, like Adware, and he verified seeing porn ads as well.
Who knows where we will see these special ads pop up next? Whether you are buying your girlfriend chocolates for Valentine’s Day or thinking of getting a new BMW you are probably just thinking about sex anyways!
There are a lot of posts about Google here. This is another one. Google is the most important entity in online advertising. I could write about Facebook and Yahoo, but what they do just doesn’t mean as much.
Last week Google announced that they are shutting down of Google Reader. This shocked many tech savvy users. RSS provides a universal way for publishers to push updates to their audience. Imagine a world where Google removed support for e-mail. This is not as far fetched as it sounds.
Why has Google lost interest in RSS? Declining use makes for a good explanation, but it is more than that.
Google is phasing out Google reader and killing Chrome RSS support because RSS is an independent platform which they would like to see replaced with Google+.
Google has provided web publishers incentives to use Google+ through authorship attribution. Besides giving a special SEO boost (at least it has for me) G+ authorship provides some limited amount of protection against content theft. Phasing out RSS is just another strategic move towards pushing G+ adaptation.
While Google gains deep and valuable demographic data with G+, this is not their only motivation toward seeing its widespread adaptation.
Last year Google converted Google Shopping to an all paid service. I anticipate Google will continue to roll other services over from free to paid. Using G+ Google will sweep a great percentage of content writers and journalists in to their traffic ecosystem. Like Youtube, this will allow for direct payments to content creators.
As Google’s own results increasingly drive traffic in to their own ecosystem (rather to other parts of the web) many businesses will see Google’s traffic streams drop off to a trickle. Publishers will either buy traffic from Google or receive nothing.
The open flow of information online is deeply at risk. The mainstream web is undergoing a transition from an open anarchy to a more feudalistic model. As any company that isn’t Google, Facebook, or Apple (sorry Microsoft) our best hope is that users will eventually reject this closed wasteland where they are all naked (no privacy, no control.)
Google has been the target of lawsuits before over Google Images. There recent redesign of Google Images is sure to raise more than eyebrows.
In an attempt to be more like Pinterest Google Image now displays nearly full-sized images within Google Images. Users who wish to see an even larger image can simply click “View original image”, bypassing the original publisher’s attributes or methods at generating income from those images. Unlike Pinterest, Google’s users did not submit these images but rather Google’s own hardware retrieved them on command. There is no fair use defense here.
In an attempt to reduce the damage to their brand Google displays a more prominent “SafeSearch” message when confronted with explicit results (with a transparent overlay leaving those results plenty visible.) However, the damage may done as it the lines between Google and publisher evaporate save for an often ignored URL string when those users need to see every last pixel.
One could briefly imagine the war over content distribution has ended as the once vilified Metallica seems to let the mountains of content available on YouTube slide. Mobile phones, tablets, and Pinterest have led to a world where archaic legacy web sites live somewhere in the border between obnoxious and hideous. The user experience now begins to tower over the law, even at small start ups, as evidenced by Uber.
Publishers who wish to continue to own their content must do so in more than DMCA barrages. To truly own your content it must be unquestionably identifiable to your brand. If not, you are just serving as a free extension to someone else’s.
Advertising arbitrage leads to some interesting mistakes. Many years ago eBay, or an affiliate, ran ads on Google for “Black Slaves” (sorry no screenshots.) I ran in to something similar recently — jobs for 8 years olds! Brought to you by eHow.com, owned by Demand Media.
Just like eBay did not have any slaves available for auction 8 years ago, Demand’s ad failed to deliver any information on jobs for 8 year olds. It did deliver quite a few ads.
It is no secret that Google is feeling the squeeze as users immigrate to mobile. Advertisers have reported mysterious jumps in their Adwords quality score (and subsequent increase in impressions), zany new animations are being tested in text ads almost daily, and rule enforcement have been relaxed leading to a surge in low quality advertisers. Perhaps Ben Edelman’s recent update on Google’s special treatment of IAC was too harsh? Get your guns out of their holsters, its the wild west all over again.
I never would have imagined that in 2013 the biggest names in tech would be responsible for delivering highly off topic advertising and barrages of pre-checked adware installs (see IAC link.) And now, HTML5 is turning the web in to one big Flash animation. Good luck.
I’ve seen a lot of wacky tricks pulled by online marketers, but this phishing scam might top them all. Someone has been registering domain names of mobile providers and offering hundreds of dollars for free simply by visiting their fake site.
Telecommunications continues to behave like the wild west, with mobile providers letting a lot of stuff slide. The continued erosion of trust between customer and service provider, combined with dirt cheap communication alternatives (sending an IM vs SMS, online voice vs mobile call) raises questions about brand longevity for AT&T, Verizon, and others.
Here are two great places I have found useful apps for web publishers and developers. If you have a useful tool or service for developers, start here.
1. Geckoboard ; new third party plug ins are routinely added to this dashboard service. Services that produce lots of data need an easy way for users to consume that data. Lots of things can go wrong with a digital business, dashboards make it easy for companies to notice something is wrong, or right, without needing a bunch of complexly written alerts.
2. Zapier ; just like with dashboards app to app communication is essential for automating businesses. Zapier allows one app action to trigger another app action. I can make a new Asana task send me an SMS, or a new Evernote note to create a file in Dropbox. Right now Zapier supports 162 different services and apps, the more the merrier for everyone.
If you want to dig deep, there is always Hacker News and Angel List, but both are time sucks..
Whether you are trying to figure out where your 99 designs entrant jacked the graphics from, or if the girl you hired off of ModelMayhem as your new company spokesperson is a hooker (I’ll leave the example off of that to be nice), reverse image search is a must have tool for any business owner.
I am somewhat amused at how many people are surprised when I mention Google’s reverse image search tool (Tineye has been doing this for a long time too, to be comprehensive use both.) Reverse image search doesn’t just parrot back to you other locations the image have been used, but you it finds images that have been altered or are a derivative of the source.
Without using reverse image search on design work you could be leaving yourself open for an expensive copyright lawsuit at worst, or at least a little embarrassment.
Neither Google nor Tineye offer a public reverse facial recognition search yet but I expect we will see it in the near future. It will be really embarrassing, probably illegal in the EU, but it is inevitable.
(amusingly, yes, this logo is also spelled wrong)
In order to compete with jobs from international workers, Americans are selling their labor on freelance job sites for several dollars per hour.
On a recent job I posted, I noticed a woman in the US bidding a couple of dollars per hour of labor. When I asked her why was bidding at below minimum wage she said it was to log hours on her new account. Presumably, a worker with hours is more qualified for a contract than one without. (based on contracts I have initiated across oDesk, Freelancer, and others, this has not been a factor in determining quality.)
The freelance labor market works like any contract auction. The auction holder balances qualification and bid price to select a winner. The only gain an American receives is English proficiency and cultural habits.
Fortunately for most Americans today, offshore workers bidding $3 an hour labor often have minimal English skills. The more proficient ones, American and otherwise, seem to gravitate around minimum wage.
The mark for non-specialized knowledge work could bottom out if more Americans try to sell their labor online and the English proficiency of foreign works increases. Americans have been benefiting from the pressures of technology driven hyper deflation for decades now; are they ready for a future that places them on the same level as the other 95%?
