Why did Google consolidate all of their privacy policies?

Perhaps it is in preparation for “Do Not Track.”

A “Do Not Track” system only works when a user is anonymously browsing a website. Once a user logs in to any site, they are tracked.

When we do not know a user’s basic demographic structure and what they are looking for, the value of internet ad inventory displayed to that individual drops precipitously (heck, is it even an individual?) Unlike the print publishing industry where an advertiser gains clout by purchasing prominent inventory, digital advertising relies on hyper targetting to squeeze out acceptable earnings. Even then, the earned revenue often dissapoints. Just ask the newspapers.

What happens if “Do Not Track” means ad networks know nothing about a user?

In the short term, Facebook becomes the only place you can purchase massive volume and still target users. Its simple, a user enables “Do Not Track”, and Facebook politely mentions that logging in no longer works.

Google could easily do the same thing. Their privacy policy consolidation makes me expect it.

If a “Do Not Track” visitor is worth 5-10% of what a normal visitor is worth, it is easy to imagine every web site that can will force users to log in. I can’t be certain about the loss of value, but I don’t think internet businesses will be giving away their content for free.

This is how we transition from an internet advertising model that guesses who you are to one that knows exactly who you are.

“Do Not Track” is a joke. Google, Facebook, and the FTC think you are pretty stupid and will easily be fooled.

defined as: “a secret understanding between two or more persons to gain something illegally, to defraud another of his or her rights, or to appear as adversaries though in agreement”

If, a major search engine consistantly responded to large search advertisers complaints about organic search results of other web sites while ignoring complaints from non-advertisers and small advertisers, is it collusion?

The search engine gains ad dollars, the advertiser gains leads (or potential customers.) In many circumstances the third party may be offering an advertising service in competition to the search engine, which could raise additional anti-trust concerns.

Is the action illegal? Yes, if the consumer has been led to believe that organic listings are truly independent when in fact they are under the influence of advertisers. Is this not the same as any other publishing industry? Perhaps, but the lack of a history of enforcement does not make the illicit legal.

While search engines may claim not to endorse their search results, the existence of manual editing to boost their own service rankings and owned properties constitutes an endorsement. One can not selectively endorse one thing and claim ignorance on the remainder of the contents without clear lines of separation. Thus, any action at the behest of an advertiser may constitute an undisclosed endorsement.

What can a search engine do to avoid issues of collusion?

1) Firewall advertisers from organic listings. All advertisers must submit their complaints through the same channels as non-advertisers. Nothing can be done to prioritize the importance of the complaints.

2) Rely solely on user inputted ratings to remove low quality results.

Lets put this in a time capsule and revisit it in 5 years:

..Rubin also said the simple mathematics of Motorola’s single-digit marketshare would keep Google from overly interfering. “Even if I was completely insane, it wouldn’t make any sense for me to think that we could get Motorola to be 90 plus percent marketshare,” and compete with the huge field of Android vendors, he said. “It just isn’t gonna happen.”

By gosh, we couldn’t possibly compete with third parties distributing our own platform! We are just a search engine, how would we steal all of those customers?

In 5 years, Google will have 90% of the Android phone/tablet market share courtesy of Motorola.

“Let’s siphon off some of this traffic for ourselves”

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.