We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks. Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of…
How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves?
In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and the…
As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start
Google has been, in many ways, a positive force in the worlds of technology, society, convenience, and information dissemination. It’s hard to argue that any of the other tech giants (save, perhaps, Microsoft) have done as much to improve numerous aspects of the lives of people around the world. But in building services outside their…
An Unpopular List of Marketing Trends for 2019
This morning, after celebrating Geraldine’s James Beard Writing Award nomination, I foolishly Google’d “marketing trends 2019“. I’m working on some presentations, and was hoping to tie back… blah blah blah… doesn’t matter. What matters is that the results are awful. Nachos-with-fake-cheese awful. Freezer-burned-waffles awful. Gas-station-hot-dog awful. Just like you’d expect, there’s a bunch of lists…
Google’s European Monopoly (& Shrinking Click-Through Opportunities)
In Europe, Google dominates the search landscape even more so than in the United States. In spite of the EU’s regulatory and hefty penalties on the search giant, and despite the anecdotally stronger desire I’ve heard from European consumers to have alternatives, Google runs Europe’s web landscape. Thanks to our friends at Jumpshot, whose clickstream…
Why We’re Putting A Bunch of Our Savings into TinySeed
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…