Geraldine and I have a pretty good financial situation going. We’re in our late thirties (which, according to this ridiculous TV graphic, means we’re in a non-existent generation). We’re somewhere between the 80th-90th percentile in savings for American families (source). And we have several sources of income — our books, my startup, Geraldine’s writing+blog content…
The Tyranny of Optimizing for Amplification
Every day, when I log into Twitter, open up LinkedIn, read my email, browse Trending or HN or Pocket, I’m in a perpetual statement of harsh, unrelenting judgement. To amplify or not to amplify? That is the question. Is it better to consume the content, extract my own value, and then move on, or is…
Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?
In the last handful of years, I’ve had a creeping sense that blog readership is dropping across the web, even as the quantity of organizations and people producing posts has grown. Stats, unfortunately, are hard to come by. Most all of the readership data is from blogging’s golden era — 2001-2012 (or so) — when…
10 Problems Plaguing Influencer Marketing
Last week, I spoke at SMXL Milano on a panel about where social media and influencer marketing are headed. The moderator, Paolo Zanzottera, did (in my opinion) a superb job, but the questions he posed and those from the audience, reminded me of the big challenges influencer marketing faces in 2018 and beyond. Photo credit:…
Google CTR in 2018: Paid, Organic, & No-Click Searches
When Google’s search results look like this, content creators, web searchers, and Google all win. When they look like this (or this, or this, or this), it’s mostly just Google and searchers who benefit. Content creators? Not so much. Some clicks might still flow through to the folks who created the content Google’s scraping and…
2018 Search Market Share: Myths vs. Realities of Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, & More
For many years, there have been pervasive myths about where Americans search on the web, whether search is dying, whether Amazon (or Facebook, or Bing) is taking Google’s market share, and plenty more. Thanks to new data generously compiled for SparkToro from Jumpshot, a clickstream data provider that monitors more than 10 million desktop and…
We Analyzed Every Twitter Account Following Donald Trump: 61% Are Bots, Spam, Inactive, or Propaganda
Last week, SparkToro launched our third free tool, a service that analyzes Twitter accounts to estimate what percent of their followers are bots, spam, propaganda, or inactive accounts. By far the account that’s been most checked by users of the tool is @realdonaldtrump. Since there’s great interest in that account, we decided to expand our…
On SERP SEO – The Infuriating Reality of Search’s Future
Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel. My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over…
SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter
On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts…
The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites
Perhaps this was inevitable. In a system that encourages monopolies, and demands those monopolies increase growth rate and extract ever more revenue (sans caveats or exceptions), we probably shouldn’t be surprised. But, we should be prepared. Google is referring less outgoing traffic to websites for the first time in its 17 year history (at least…