Reality Check: For Many Publishers, Google Is Much Less Important Than You Think
Arnon Mishkin is a consultant focused on media and internet companies.
The easiest way to clear a room of internet-savvy media executives is to suggest that maybe they should close their sites to crawling and prevent Google (NSDQ: GOOG) from carrying excerpts of their content.
Bravo!
Google’s most vocal supporters are the littlest sites who have built their brand via links, which are found on Google, Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, twitter, et al.
But what we found in analyzing hundreds of thousands of user click thoughs to content across a variety of sites is that Google traffic is some of the worst. There’s lots of clicks, but in general, those visitors don’t stay to read more, and they very infrequently come back.
On the other hand, the major media outlets already have subscribers, and an audience. Natural, repeat readers are far more valuable than the drive-bys that Google delivers.
Is it true then, that Google doesn’t know searcher’s intent as well as they’d have us believe?
For one perspective, look no further than Google’s own ad model: Every click on an ad — $20B a year– is a signal from the user that Google’s natural search results failed to deliver on intent as well as the ad. And Google choice of which ad to display is simply based on….which ad pays the most to Google. Not very fancy. Google /could/ feed back that ad response data to make their search engine smarter. But dramatically improving search would kill their golden-egg laying goose.
Still disagree? Perhaps you think “traffic” is critical to making money. Please cast a critical eye over to youtube. The worlds largest online ad company with the worlds largest video site, with the most users and user minutes still isn’t profitable after 3 years of trying.
That’s 350M unique visitors, 75Billion videos served a year and still less profitable than a so-called “old-media, dead trees” magazine. Whoops.
Media will do well to stop listening to “web saavy” people and get on with building their own business.
Lots of valid points here. (Unfortunately the atrocious editing was significant obstacle to my comprehension.)
One nitpick about the comment above: “And Google choice of which ad to display is simply based on….which ad pays the most to Google.”
This is wrong. Google “Google quality score” to see why.”
Interesting how such a young “industry” is so filled with myths. The reliance on traffic from Google is based on another myth, that content sites can support themselves with ads—if they can just get just enough audience.
[PS., I'm an art director, but I caught no editing problems, and read all the way through this excellent post.]
It is true that Google is of less importance than before because of the i pad and other things but still it takes some more time for the sites to be self sustainable.
http://www.hindlist.com