Both Google and Firefox see a future of their web browsers free of the address bar. Coupled with an evolving search engine results landscape that favors paid traffic, the world of web site publishers in 2011 looks dramatically different than it did when I started this blog nearly six years ago back in 2005.

What better way to ensure that maximum value flows to you than to get rid of the most common points users leak out of your traffic ecosystem: own the web browser, eliminate the address bar, maximize users clicking advertisements, fill your free listings with sites that drive massive volume through your display ad network, replace the URL with the “app.”

Eric Schmidt was dead serious when he said “The fastest path to wealth is the construction of these digital platforms, where other people depend on you.” You better believe that Larry, Sergey, and Eric are damn annoyed that Apple is worth over $300 billion, and they are going to do everything they can to be #1.

This is the pace of change which technology brings. Even if the DOJ and the EU dropped the anti-trust bomb on Google tomorrow, there would never be a traffic environment circa 2005 ever again. If you don’t like change, and your value stream flows from the old way, it might be time to sell your company to someone who enjoys change.

My final blog posts are coming soon.

Net Neutrality is about one thing — Cable TV based ISPs (Time Warner, Comcast, etc) trying to recover lost revenue from exiting cable video subscribers. For both cable television subscription services and telephone service (be it traditional or VoIP) the future looks bleak.

I used to watch a lot of video on demand from Amazon. That was until I realized a lot of the stuff I had been watching had made its way to Netflix on demand. Instead of paying $2 an episode now I’m paying $7 a month. $100 for an Apple TV box and now I’m watching all of this video on my 55″ Samsung LCD and surround sound system. That is a steal.

The reality is that bandwidth is a commodity. You can’t brand it or claim yours tastes better than the competition. If an ISP tries to throttle a traffic source it can be tunneled. If they try to throttle your bandwidth you can just switch to a new ISP. I would recommend short selling shares of those companies that will be on the losing end of this battle.

The future looks marvelous for Google and Apple (and perhaps Netflix.) The two tech behemoths own their own platforms and have a massive, and affluent, user base. Other companies like Microsoft and RIM could have had a piece of this pie but they suffered brain drains and simply do not have their shit together (congrats to Microsoft for buying Skype, smart move if they manage to avoid sodomizing it.)

Ironically despite finally reaching this point where your average joe is paying for their content instead of pirating it, the United States government has taken overreaching steps to crack down on piracy. These steps are so extraordinary that Napster, Youtube, and Bittorrent would have been snuffed out in their early days, and Sean Parker would be sitting in federal prison instead of being played by Justin Timberlake. That is sad, because innovation will be driven overseas. Imagine a world where we copy Chinese businesses instead of them copying us.

The net neutrality wars are going to be ugly and obnoxious. They will drain shareholder value that should have been paid out in dividends and instead place them in the pockets of high paid lawyers and lobbyists.

Irregardless of these battles that take place, I am certain on one outcome: within 5 years consumers will be able to view their favorite television shows and movies on any device they own, at any time, in any place, hassle free (75% of the way there now.) Streaming video advertising will gobble up far more ad dollars than traditional broadcast advertising. ABC, NBC, and CBS will be shells of what they once were. Many cable television networks will no longer exist. The internet will have done to video distribution what the internet did to print distribution, in a much shorter time frame than anyone expects. Video piracy will be dead in the US because no one wants to put the effort in.

As a web publisher solidifying your brand is going to be critical. If you come across well on video or have the budget to hire those that do, you will be able to survive SE algorithm shake ups. Increasingly when people look for stuff they will demand video content. That article you have an Indian rewrite from someone elses website, with Adsense ads plastered around it, that isn’t going to work anymore. People won’t want to put in the effort. And video advertising will pay enough that they don’t need to click contextual text ads.

As William Gibson says — “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” If you look at my “predictions” I actually just told you what is already true. Its just that in 5 years its going to be more true.

If Elisa Cooper at MarkMonitor has her way, it will soon be much easier for other people to steal your domain names!

The URS has a shortened time frame for domain owners to respond, so short that if you go on vacation your likely to miss the time, and parts of the proposal under consideration include one where a domain owner who loses a fixed number of URS in a certain time frame may be barred from even filing a defense to future URS filings.

Moreover Mark Monitor wants the Global Trademark Database which is part of the new gTLD process to apply to .Net’s as well.

The problem with that is the WIPO database which is already up and operating, in anticipation of the passage of the final gTLD rules, contains over 630,000 entries, including most dictionary words, two and three letter combo’s and all sorts of generic terms. Hell even the letter ‘F” is in the database.

Via TheDomains

After over 5 years of blogging on WebPublishingBlog, I’m shutting it down!

The goals I set for the blog, when I created it, were accomplished long ago. I’ve been running a multi-million dollar company for the past few years which requires 100% of my attention.

Before I “close the gates” I have two blog posts that absolutely need to be published. They are already written in some form and really need to see the light of day.

The first is a summery of the biggest mistakes I have watched entrepreneurs make. This stuff happens over and over again and doesn’t need to.

The second and final post will be about how I cured my “carpel tunnel” (RSI.) From when I started this blog until late last year I had severe wrist and hand pain when experiencing any type of strain, keyboard, mouse, picking up heavy shit. This was a serious handicap that cut down on my productivity. I had spent thousands of dollars on ergonomic keyboards and chairs — both keyboards and chairs that cost me over $1k a pop. I had completely given up.

These posts should be up in the next week or two. And with that I will lock down the blog. It won’t get deleted, but no more updates and comments.

I don’t hate Demand Media or Richard Rosenblatt. I do get a little annoyed when I am searching for stuff on Google and end up seeing results written by people who obviously knew nothing about what they were writing. Demand Media’s properties and affiliates are hardly alone in that regards.

That is not what this blog post is about.

What I find very concerning is that Richard Rosenblatt and others want to change the definition of content farm. This is a common technique used in manipulating public opinion (thanks Edward Bernays!)

So lets set the record straight: not only is Demand Media a content farm, the phrase “content farm” was created specifically to describe Demand Media’s business model.

In a recent interview at paidcontent.org, when asked if Google thinks Demand Media is a content farm Rosenblatt responded: “I think content farms have become such a general term that everyone is just throwing around. You know content farms could be automatic, non-human content that scrapes other people’s articles like ours, steals them, and publishes them. So, I mean, I don’t know what they define content farms as. We don’t see ourselves as one.”

With a few quick searches on google by date range, I took a look at what the top results on Google had to say about “content farm”:

152,000 2010 – #1 My Summer on the Content Farm (working for demand media) http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/my-summer-on-the-content-farm

70,200 2009 – #1 Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried “I’ve been writing a lot about so-called ‘content farms’ in recent months – companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web.”

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

45,500 2008 – #1 “Farm Stands” — top rankings refer to agriculture and MS tech. We can assume the the phrase “content farm” not only originated in 2009 but it was specifically in reference to Demand Media.

Run the searches yourself. Until Google started to pretend that content farms were something they were not, everyone appeared to be in agreement that Demand Media was a content farm.

What Rosenblatt is describing above is not a content farm at all — it is a scraper site. Scrapers have been around in the blackhat seo world since the 90s. The wikipedia entry for “content farm” was created in July of 2010. As the Google search results show, this is a new term. What did that first Wikipedia entry say a content farm was? “In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm refers to a website that generates large amounts of textual ‘content’ by paying third-party contractors.” I agree.

Today what does Wikipedia say content farms are? “In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue.”

Why is Google so intent on pretending that Demand Media is not a content farm? Why does Matt Cutts pretend that no one thinks that content farming is a problem? Why did a recent Google update bitchslap nearly every major content farm except Demand Media’s?

Demand’s relationship with Google raises a lot of questions. As a publicly traded company Demand may be legally obligated to disclose the nature of this unusually close relationship to its investors.

I can’t remember the last time I saw viagra/cialis/offtopic spam appear in Google’s SERPs. Just a fluke or a sign of things to come?

One of the ways internet business owners get rich is through IPOs. Recent internet company IPOs include Quinstreet and Demand Media. Meanwhile, Facebook and Groupon get all of the press. Neither has had an IPO. Based on recent private transactions of ownership, Facebook is worth over $70 billion and Groupon over $5 billion. Of course, the owners of both have what amounts to a piece of paper which is worth whatever someone will pay for it. Wonder why Mark Zuckerberg still rents? He doesn’t have $1 billion in the bank.

The recent real estate bubble in the United States left a lot of people wondered where all of the money went. How can the economy crash, the dollars just changed hands, right?

If your property triples in value, and you sold it, you made a lot of money, right? If you took out a home equity loan, and bought a boat, someone made money selling you the boat?

When the stock tech bubble was at its peak over a decade ago, some entrepreneurs were feeling very comfortable looking at a net worth of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. At least that was what formulas told them their net worth was.

In this case net worth was calculated by taking how much ownership I have multiplied by what someone would pay for a fraction of it based on how much of that fraction was available for sale today. That is not really a good way to look at the valuation of anything (and it goes both ways.)

A similar thing happened during the real estate bubble. A lot of people thought they got rich, and really didn’t. Those home equity loans are still on someone’s balance sheet. That is why the US Federal Reserve and Treasury have been doing all kinds of weird things since the 2008 stock market implosion — basically changing the rules to keep bankrupt companies afloat. This is a way to prevent a short term economic collapse but it comes at a very expensive long term cost. Either the banks become zombie institutions or the US government and all that benefit from its spending absorb those losses.

In the end, is everyone as a whole richer?

No. The people that got richer are the ones who cashed out. If your purchasing power is greater now, post-bubble, because of the bubble, you got rich from it. In fact, the very act of cashing out involves taking liquidity from someone else — just like what will happen when Mark Zuckerberg and friends begin trading their Facebook ownership for cash.

If you want to get rich from stock and real estate bubbles you need to have equity early and cash out on the ride up. By the late peak it is too late to cash out because you simply do not have enough time or enough buyers. Alternatively you can arbitrage yourself through a bubble buying early on and selling as much as possible toward the end. That is what “flippers” do with real estate. If you buy from a flipper to flip for yourself, good luck.

A lot of discussion is going on about a new tech bubble. This started years ago, but Groupon’s recent rejection of Google’s $5 billion+ offer has brought the web 2.0 bubble (or whatever we are calling it) to the top front of web entrepreneur’s minds.

There damn well may be a new web tech bubble right now. Is hopping on Second Market and buying up Facebook stock a good idea? Make your own decision. One thing is clear, your going to have to put mid nine-figures in to it if you want to become another Facebook billionaire.

Over the past six years it has been very disappointing seeing other website publishers fail to take their company seriously. When you build something online that works, and you have your shit together, it grows fast. If you are an innovator let the people who read the how to get rich online blogs fight over the tiny markets.

We are hardly 15 years in to the internet being a mass market medium. Imagine the first oil boom, only 15 years in. Unlike oil, this industry will still be around in 100 years. Buckle your set belts, if your smart you don’t need a stock or real estate bubble to become wealthy.

When you own a contextual advertising network the most important thing is the content of a page rather than the details of its users.

So, if one of your biggest competitors is about to launch a demographically targeted display ad network why not make it easy for your user base to cripple their tracking methods?

The change in Google CEO’s triggers the beginning of an escalating war between the web’s largest giants..

Is your audience dumber than a pile of bricks? Google’s new reading level results give publishers and online advertisers a glimpse in to whether readers struggled through 4th grade English class or polished off textbooks for dinner in college.

I ran a few popular news websites through Google and came up with some interesting data points. Perhaps the secret to Gawker’s successful blogging empire is that their audience isn’t even as sophisticated as Sarah Palin? After all, FoxNews.com has even more intermediate and advanced text content than NPR.

Future ideas for Google’s rating tools: estimating individual users’ IQ based on public social network profile content, gmail reading level, and demographics.

I through in a science site as a baseline to “higher end” content: