Google, Facebook, and Twitter: What Happened Last Summer?
I was reading an article about the recruiting strategies of Twitter, and one of the comments slammed working at twitter as a place to work. He had a small graph to back up his claim that Twitter was fading. This graph couldn’t possibly be correct, I thought. With all of the hype surrounding social media, Twitters reach could not possibly be on the decline already, could it? So I found a tool that he had used to graph ‘Reach’, according to Alexa. They define reach as the percent of all users who visit a given site. It is expressed in the number of users per million who visit that site. Here is the graph of reach for the last two years for twitter:
Wow, it appears that Twitter’s reach peaked in July or August of last year, and does in fact appear to be on a downward trajectory. This made me a little curious about the reach of some other sites, so I tried Facebook. Surely Facebook has an ever-expanding reach. Here’s the same Alexa Reach graph for Facebook:
Facebook was also on the expected upward growth in reach, until July-August of last year. They aren’t dropping, but their reach obviously flattened out at around the same time frame. Interesting, but just a coincidence? Let’s look at Google, same time frame:
Google appear to have peaked at just over 500,000 out of a million, or half of all users in early July of last year. Although not as dramatic as Twitter or Facebook, they did have a sharp drop in August and an apparent flattening out of growth in their reach since that point in time.
What does this mean? Google, Twitter, Facebook, what happened last summer? Did the public reach some tipping point of oversaturation from these three major players on the internet? These figures are gathered from users of the Alexa tool bar, was there a change in Alexa users that caused these figures to change? If you have any theories, Please comment below.
If you have an online presence, trends can impact how you should be allocating your resources to best strengthen your online presence. It is important to follow trends in search and social media. If you have a social media strategy, it is important to know the potential reach of social media. It is much hyped right now, but is the general public growing tired of Twitter and Facebook? It is important to have better search engine rankings, but is Google losing its reach? If so it bears watching, and you might want to cover your bases. There are many ways to be found on the internet, and a good online presence management strategy involves making sure you are found in all of those places. Good website SEO is important, but things are constantly changing, so being found everywhere is better.
Online This Week: Jan. 27, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Jan. 23-Jan. 27, 2012:
Apple releases 4th Quarter Revenue
On Tuesday of this week Apple announced its revenue for the 4th quarter of 2011, and as MG Siegler observed in this TechCrunch story, it was “The Day Apple Left the Tech World’s Collective Mouth Agape”. The numbers were staggering: $46.33 billion in revenue with $13.06 billion in profit.
Google and Facebook Announce Changes
Possibly trying to go under the radar because of Apple’s stunning revenue reports, Facebook and Google both made announcements that could ultimately prove very unpopular. Some have suggested they hoped these announcements would attract less attention in the technical blogosphere by timing them to coincide with the Apple Revenue numbers. Regardless, both stories blew up the tech blogosphere, as well as crossing over into mainstream media. Google announced it would be sharing all tracking data across all of its properties, including Gmail, Google+, search, YouTube, and more. This will allow them to ostensibly generate more detailed user profiles to better target ads. Their justification, of course, was to provide a better user experience. Read more about Google’s change in my earlier blog post. Facebook announced that the Timeline feature will be rolled out as the only user profile in the near future. The Timeline profile should allow Facebook to capture more detailed user profiles, again to better target ads. Facebook also claimed the purpose was to enhance user experience. Read more about Facebook’s changes and the growing backlash against both companies in my recent blog post.
“Don’t Be Evil” Bookmarklet Shows Google’s Bias
A tool developed by Facebook and Twitter engineers took a slap at Google’s hypocrisy and their corporate logo. The tool attempts to show what Google search results should look like if they indexed all social media, and not just Google+. For a great explanation of how it works and more about the Focus on the User website, read this informative article written by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.
Google vs. Facebook: Loser? Privacy
An article in USAToday this morning stated “Google and Facebook might have finally gotten the average consumer riled up about privacy”. Google and Facebook both made big announcements yesterday concerning user data and how it will be collected, used, and displayed. I wrote a blog post yesterday about Google’s announced changes. Basically, Google will begin sharing all of the data that it collects across search, Google+, Gmail, Youtube, and it’s other properties. They changed their privacy policies by rolling some 60+ privacy policies into just one.
Facebook announced yesterday that within the next few weeks their new timeline feature will become the profile for all users, and no longer an option. The timeline feature makes it easier for Facebook to profile users. As people adjust to the change, they may feel like data that was private before has been pushed to the timeline. They will have to adjust to new privacy settings under the new feature, and I expect the outcry against it from the general public will be louder than the last feature change that changed the newsfeed.
Both Google and Facebook have seemingly thumbed their noses at any question of privacy violations. They both seem to have the attitude they can do whatever they want with data that they collect from the users of their services. There are huge stakes here, as they battle to provide more detailed user profiles, which allow them to offer better targeted marketing. The global online advertising market is expected to grow from $80 billion this year to $132 billion in 2015, according to eMarketer.
So who or what can stop them? Both companies have had their problems with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and there have been calls for further inquiries into both. Both companies have increased their lobbying budgets, Google from $5.2 million in 2010 to $9.7 million in 2011, and Facebook from $351,000 in 2010 to $1.4 million in 2011. Don’t expect more than a slap on the wrist from the FTC. The only thing that could stand in their way would be users turning away from their services because they just get too fed up with privacy violations.
The USA Today article went on to say that the changes announced on Tuesday seems to have struck a chord with users. Have Google and Facebook finally hit a tipping point in their race to profile users at the cost of privacy? Will users begin to walk away from either of the two services out of frustration with privacy violations?
If you are an online presence manager who uses search engine internet marketing, changes allowing improved targeting and retargeting of customers across all platforms could be in the very near future. As long as Google and Facebook manage the reaction to privacy changes so that there is no significant pushback from users, some of the best targeted pay-per-click advertising opportunities ever could soon become a reality.
Google to Merge User Data across More Services
Google announced on Tuesday that it would begin tracking more user data across all of its services, including search, Gmail, YouTube, and others. This story did not just break in the technical search blogosphere, but was a major story in USA Today. Previously, a user habits were only used to target ads within the particular product. When this announced change goes into effect March 1st, activities will be tracked across all of Google’s products to target ads across all of Google’s products. USA today points out that this change reflects Google’s desire to get as large of a share as it can of the US online advertising market, which was $32 billion in 2011.
Google has been faced with a growing challenge from Facebook for online advertising. It is beginning to seem as though there is no limit to the depths to which Google or Facebook are willing to sink in terms of privacy violation to provide better targeted marketing. Better targeted marketing translates to bigger online advertising market share. Facebook is pushing forward with their timeline “feature”. This businessinsider.com article reported that users will be forced to use the timeline feature, whether they like it or not.
This ZDnet.com article goes into a little more detail on the good, the bad, and the scary issues with Googles changes in data collection. Google has pointed out that it is not collecting more data, it is just making all of the data it has about you available to all of its products. The upside to that is that where Google now has 70 different privacy policies for its different products, it will be replaced with one privacy policy. The downside is that basically the privacy policy is that you have none.
This article in Gizmodo.com called Google out and flat out declared that Google has violated its “Don’t be evil” policy. Google’s original policy stated “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. No matter how Google may try to spin some of their recent changes as being all about the user experience, the truth is they are not. Recent changes to incorporate Google+ into search were clearly a move to strengthen their social media offering. They can spin it all they want and say they were improving the relevance of the search results. Anyone looking at that change objectively would see that if they were serious about improving search relevance with social media they would be attempting to include all social media. Now this change to a model that allows sharing of private data across all platforms is very obviously a play to monetize the users data and strengthen their market share in online advertising.
The timing of the announcement? That was a little suspect as well. As this businessinsider.com article points out, they announced the change on the heels of Apple’s earnings announcement. The old method to bury a bad news story was to drop a press release late on Friday of a long weekend. With today’s 24/7 news cycle, apparently the new version of that old trick is to try and bury a story under what you hope is an even bigger news story of your competition.
What does this mean to the users of Google products? Will they grow tired of privacy invasions to the point that it will impact Google’s popularity? There are no signs of that happening yet. There is however a growing undercurrent of mistrust of Google that seems to be growing. Media coverage of some of Google’s latest moves that paint an unflattering picture of Google seem to be spreading from some of the techno-SEO blogs and media to the more mainstream, as in today’s USA Today article.
What does this mean to you if you are have an online presence and you are considering search engine internet marketing? You should eventually be able to do even more targeted marketing than was ever available. Things like retargeted marketing, where ads target users based on keyword searches, gmail content, and their YouTube viewing habits. This could create unprecedented ability to target Pay-Per-Click advertising to an amazing extent.
Google SPYW Reaction Continues
Reaction to Google’s Search Plus Your World Change has continued to light up the tech blogosphere, as well as a little mainstream media coverage. This article in techland.time.com reviewed the basics of SPYW, and then noted that EPIC had filed a request for a FTC investigation. He went on to say that the actions of Google were not going to lead to any anti-trust action. His reasoning is that Google is big, with it’s 65% market share, but not monopolistically big. Also, low barriers to entry into the market as a rival search engine should protect them. He continued that Google does, however have a problem with the new feature. That problem is a problem of market reaction. He notes that user dissatisfaction ahs been simmering under the surface for a long time. He points to a fed up Mat Honan of Gizmodo switching to Bing, and frustrated blog posters like John Gruber and Rick Webb, whose frustrating attempts to get gold prices lead him away from Google to WolframAlpha.com.
Tom Foremski predicted in Memeburn.com that SPYW would push legions of marketers to fill Google+ with spam, alienating potential users, and ultimately harming the relevance of search that was too integrated with Google+. He went on to cite Rand Fishkin’s article on SEOMoz.org entitled “Every Marketer Now Needs a Google Strategy” as proof that the marketing push onto Google+ in the wake of the SPYW change was already beginning.
Perhaps the cleverest reaction to the change is a new browser plug-in developed by Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace engineers. The “Don’t Be Evil” button, a not so subtle backhanded slap at Google’s corporate motto, will allow you to see results, the old way, without the inclusion of search plus your world results. You can read more about it in this Gizmodo article, where the author goes on to suggest a possible rollback of this feature if market reaction continues. You can also get the bookmark at focusontheuser.org, where the make the case that Google’s results would be more relevant if they included all social media.
Will Google eventually back down and roll back this feature? Will FTC pressure force them to roll back this feature or at least create a level playing field in search for all social media? I would tend to disagree with Jerry Brito’s article in techland.time.com that Google is not big enough to have some anti-trust problems with the FTC. If Google had remained just a search engine, and Facebook or Twitter was taking action to get better placement in Google, then that would not be a concern of the FTC. But Google is now using its dominance in search to give an advantage to its own social media platform Google+. That seems unfair, and it seems very similar to the trouble Microsoft got into with the FTC, when they attempted to leverage their dominance as an operating system into an unfair advantage for its software offerings. Look for the FTC to come down hard on Google for crossing that line, and if that happens a rollback of this feature would be more likely.
In the mean time, if you have an online presence and you are you are concerned with better search engine ranknings, you can’t ignore this change. As Rand Fishkin pointed out in the article cited previously, you need a Google strategy, and for now and the foreseeable future that strategy should have much emphasis placed on Google+. It may quickly become the fastest way to achieve significant search engine internet marketing results.
Google and the Ads above the Fold Algorithm Change
Google announced a change to its algorithm on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012 involving page layout and the placement of ads. The purpose of the change, according to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, was to punish websites with excessive advertising “above the fold”. At first glance this probably seems like a good idea. Nobody likes to sift through search results for a somewhat relevant result, and then when you click over to that page you are assaulted by a barrage of ads that make it impossible to find the content you are really looking for. Google says that the change will only affect 1 in 100 searches. Matt Cutts, Googles SEO guru says that no one who uses “ads above the fold to a normal degree” will be affected. But if you think about it from the web designer’s perspective, how much is “a normal degree”?
When Google speaks, SEO consultants and search engine internet marketing professionals need to listen. The problem in answering the question of what is “a normal degree” is complicated by the mixed message and what some may even call hypocrisy on the part of Google. The image below shows some sample Google search results from my laptop. The red highlighted areas show ads, the green highlights show search results. You be the judge if that would constitute excessive advertisement above the fold.
So what exactly is Google’s definition of excessive advertising? Do they intend to penalize themselves? The hypocrisy has been noted in many blog posts that are critical of this latest change. Some examples are this post on webmonkey.com, and a little more strongly worded response in this blogstorm.co.uk.
Google has every right to change their algorithm. As they have so often pointed out when they have been questioned, competition is only a click away. It is noteworthy that there seems to be growing vitriol expressed every time Google makes an algorithm change. The changes seem to be coming with increasing frequency. Many of the changes lately, though not this one in particular, seem to be Google forcing a change that benefits Google in the name of making search results more relevant. This has led to a growing questioning of motives and actions of Google that speaks to the question of eroding trust in Google as the guardians of their own motto, “Do No Evil”. There was a time when Google was a trusted, seemingly neutral, trusted indexer of the web. There is a growing feeling that the important job of indexing the web is no longer being performed by a trusted, benevolent force. And that should be a problem that Google should worry about.
If you have a website, and you are concerned about better search engine rankings, Google is still, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the biggest game in town, so you have to play. If you want to be successful you have to play by their rules, regardless of any arguments about their fairness. This means now if you have advertising on your front page, keep it below the fold if possible.
Online This Week: Jan. 20, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Jan. 16-Jan. 20, 2012:
Big Week in SOPA News
First, President Obama spoke out publicly against SOPA last Saturday. Congress then announced that it would shelve SOPA to “consider its option” and “address outstanding concerns”. SOPA may not dead, but it appeared to be mortally wounded. This is didn’t stop the scheduled protests on Wednesday of this week. I talked about those in a previous blog post. Wikipedia went dark, Google covered their logo in black, and a few other major players added links to sites where people could get more involved in the fight against SOPA. Read more at ZDNet, Mashable.com and Memeburn.
The Google-Mocality Scandal
Google got caught in an embarrassing scandal involving a Kenyan office of Google. The Google office apparently scraped a database of clients from a company called Mocality. They went on to pitch a project to those pilfered clients by saying that they were in partnership with Mocality on the project, which was not true. Mocality successfully conducted a sting operation on the IP addresses who had done the scraping, and was even to gather some recordings of the Google sales pitch made to the client leads. Caught red handed, Google released a statement that they were “mortified” by the actions. Read more here…
Continued Reaction to Google’s Search Plus Your World
Google’s new “Search Plus Your World”, which is now being abbreviated to either “SPYW” or “Search+”, continued to be a huge topic of conversation in the search engine internet marketing world. I reviewed some of the reaction in a blog post on Tuesday. The consensus seems to be that this is a major change, with far reaching ramifications. Many were saying that this will push Google+ to the top of any list of factors that affect your online presence in 2012. Some were saying that this could create Google+ spam that could cause people to begin abandoning the fledgling social network. Google’s strategy of socializing search is probably visionary, but the timing of the rollout, while Google+ is still struggling for acceptance, and the exclusion of other social networks, could possibly be too much for even Google to overcome. Look for the FTC to come down hard when hearings start later this year…
Google’s Earnings Announced
In more it’s been a bad few weeks for Google news, this morning they announced the their revenue numbers for last quarter, and they missed analysts expectations. Net revenue was $8.13 billion vs. $8.36 billion expected. Their stock fell 10% in early trading. Wow, when Google has a bad week, they REALLY have a bad week.
Doing SEO the Right Way
As a business owner, your success can often depend on your online presence. There are those who build a website and then let the chips fall where they may on all of the other factors that determine the strength of your online presence. There are many factors that impact the strength of your online presence. I covered many of these factors in previous blog posts in an 11 part series, my Online Presence Management Guide. Probably the most well known component of a strong online presence, aside from building a website, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are many SEO consultants bombarding anyone who puts up a web site with promises of better search engine rankings. How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys? Just like in the old west, there are what is considered “black hat” SEO and “white hat” SEO. The easiest way to tell the difference? Promises of a #1 ranking on Google will almost always come from someone who should be wearing a black hat.
Having a strong online presence does require search engine optimization, but it has to be done the right way. Lately, a lot has been said about the changing of the search engine algorithms, and site that have been negatively impacted by these changes. A great article in SEOMoz.org outlined the history of what these games have been for the last few years, and how all of these gaming strategies eventually failed. This put one thing in perspective. If an SEO expert is out to game the system, they may find short term success. These are the black hat guys. They will eventually fail in the long run.
If you want long term success that isn’t going to be impacted by algorithm changes, avoid the current latest method of gaming the system. Follow the guidelines of what the search engines are trying to accomplish. Make your site engaging and relevant, so that it is a site that others want to link to. Make your site easy for the search engines to find, crawl and index. Make all of the content true to the real purpose of your website.
Doing SEO the right way means never having to worry about algorithm updates again.
PCs Dying a Slow Death Thanks to Mobile?
The PC may be dying a slow death, thanks in large part to the rise of mobile computing. A very interesting chart compiled by Horace Dediu was also then referenced in a businessinsider article that hypothesized that the PC may be in the beginning stages of a slow painful death. The chart is shown below. For anyone old enough to remember TRS-80’s it’s also kind of an interesting high-tech trip down memory lane. (Full Disclosure: In 1977 I was a TRS-80 early adopter thanks to my paper route nest egg of $500.)
The case that they make from the chart is that it appears PC sales have gone flat, and perhaps even peaked. Also from the chart it is quite obvious that the meteoric rise of iphones, ipads, and android phones and tablets could very well be one of the main contributing factors to accelerating the decline of the PC.
What does this mean if you have an online presence and you want to market your business on the web? For any online presence manager, it means mobile cannot be ignored if you want to command a strong online presence. At the very least a mobile version of your website needs to be developed. Tablets and smart phones could become the browsing method of choice in the very near future for most of the potential clients looking for you. Will you be ready?
SOPA Day of Protest
Today is a day of protest against two bills currently before congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and it’s slightly less offensive little brother, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). You’ve probably heard about these acts, and you may or may not know why defeating them is so important for the future of the internet. If you’ve heard about this but don’t know the details, today is the day to get up to speed on what’s going on. Get the basic facts about the bills, read about it here in Wikipedia (Even today, when Wikipedia is ‘blacked out’, you can still access this direct link). Read this brilliant analysis of why this bill is so dangerous on mashable.com.
To mark today as a day of protest, and to raise awareness of SOPA and its dangers, some major and many minor websites have taken some major steps. Wikipedia has ‘gone dark’ for 24 hours, replacing the front page of the English version of the website with the following:
Reddit has also gone dark, but only for 12 hours:
Google has placed an ominous black box over there logo, and added this link to a page which advises people on what they can do to help defeat SOPA:
Craigslist added a black SOPA page, also with links to try and get more people involved in the fight against SOPA:
WordPress added a black front page, also with SOPA warnings and links to a call to action:
The award for most amusing, as well as informative SOPA protest has to go to Oatmeal.com. If you haven’t seen it, do it now.
Hopefully this unprecedented action by these major websites will be a wake up call to enough people that we will have reached a tipping point in the battle against SOPA. Even before today’s actions, there are signs that the groundswell of noise from the tech community may have been heard in Washington. Last Saturday, the White House came out publicly against SOPA. A few hours later congress announced that the Bill had been shelved. SOPA is not dead, but perhaps it is mortally wounded.
Read More at:
Mashable.com – Why SOPA is Dangerous
Washington Monthly – Putting SOPA on a Shelf
Wikipedia – SOPA and PIPA- Learn More
ZDNet.Com – Geeks-1, Conress-0: Controversial anti-Piracy Bill ‘shelved’
Do Something to Help:
Google – End Piracy, Not Liberty