Skeptics of online video advertising used to be concerned that YouTube videos could not be monetized due to copyright infringement, offensive content, and general lack of quality.
Surprisingly, big brand advertisers have not shied away from disturbing content as shown below from the Daily Mail, with an ad for Activia yogurt running in front of a video of a woman being mauled by several pitbulls which are promptly shot to death by police.
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!
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.
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.
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%?
How does your page load time influence your conversion rates?
No idea? A service I have found useful is Torbit. It provides a simple way to monitor your site load times. Their code initiates a timer which completes when all site assets are loaded.
The premium version allows you to break down your conversion rates by page load time. If you have never seen this before, you may be in for a surprise.
The positive — they have a free account. If your curious of your page load time distribution, you can see this for no cost. The free version also has a live feed instantly showing you user load times as they occur. Very helpful for identifying problems.
The big negative, premium costs $499 a month. I used it initially to see my conversion rate curve, but ended up downgrading it back to free. Jumping from free to $499 ($399 billed annually) seems like an unusual price jump. In their defense, I think Torbit accounts are priced to handle sites with a ton of traffic. Their page lists Cheezburger and Cafepress as customers.
How much is search worth? In September of this year job search engine Indeed.com was purchased by a Japanese company for a price estimated to be around $1 billion. Right now you can utilize search-as-a-service with Searchify, starting at $0 a month. The link between the two companies is Searchify’s founder, Chris Lamprecht, one of the guys that build Indeed.
I have been using Searchify since spring of 2012. Searchify’s support has been great, even making some adjustments to their code to better fit our needs. Billing is by indexed documents rather than searches. This is a big plus since our business model requires a lot of volume. On the flip side, if you have a massive database growing at an exponential rate, you may wish to look elsewhere.
Providing instant result search for your customers is a big deal. Offloading your searches to Google or returning results slowly is not acceptable for a modern start up. It will cost you users and investors.
Today as Google faces serious inquiries from regulators on both continents, it is a good time to run an alternative, no matter how niche it may be.
