47 ms·

Google and blogs: “Shit.”

76 points by dce 12y ago

LukeHoersten 12y ago
The trend seems to be "blog + feed" all-in-one platforms like Medium.com now. The old blogging model was the feed readers were separate from the platforms. I'm not sure if that's better or worse but that seems to be all that's left.
- api 12y ago
  It's a continuation of the long-term and broad trend of silo-ization and movement to closed platforms.
- eli 12y ago
  Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s. I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.
  - stevesearer 12y ago
    This is the reason I prefer that my readers subscribe to my opt-in weekly email newsletter rather than using Google Reader/RSS. They get a quick little digest of the top content from the previous week and click through if it looks interesting. RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in terms of people using and interacting with it.
    - eli 12y ago
      Yup, it's hard to beat email for engagement. Maybe really well executed push notifications.
  - bonaldi 12y ago
    People love stripped-down versions: Instapaper, Pocket, Flipboard et al are all testament to that (as is AdBlock, to an extent) I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain. The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.
getdavidhiggins 12y ago
Why are we writing to please Google? Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See: http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494 http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494 It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb. The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve. IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there. http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > IMHO, Marco's should never have to worry about traffic. You'd have thought the same about, say Metafilter, as well. But apparently not.
- eveningcoffee 12y ago
  Is Robert Scoble a fool? You need a Facebook account to access his content.
- jarcane 12y ago
  I can't make AdSense revenues from a Twitter account. In fact, if Twitter or Facebook suspect I'm a professional concern rather than simply an ordinary Joe, they may expect me to pay them money to promote my content, or even to make it visible. I already have dealt with exactly that on my 'regular Joe' FB account in the past, because I had pages for my book label attached. Thankfully they seem to have realized that there was zero traffic to them and stopped, but I still sometimes worry about how much of my stuff is actually being 'curated' out of my friends' feeds.
Yhippa 12y ago
What does the blog title mean?
- bishnu 12y ago
  Marco famously tweeted "Shit." when Apple introduced an Instapaper clone into iOS/Safari. He kinda re-uses it whenever a big company does something to squash smaller ones/individuals. It's tongue-in-cheek.
  - BobMarz 12y ago
    Not that famously it seems. He frets about traffic decline and wants to be more widely read, yet his headlines have inside jokes?
- bobbles 12y ago
  He means it like "Shit, this could be bad" instead of "this is shit"
mp3file 12y ago
The sky is falling down!
- eveningcoffee 12y ago
  It appears that it is already down and is crushing bloggers into underground or into arms of few (one) big players.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Marco makes a solid point. The challenge for Google of course is that their CPC has been eroding for years now. That means the only way to make their number is to increase the available ad slots on the page, which pushes organic folks off the page. You can of course spend AdWords dollars and stay on the page, but then your RPM is offset by your ad spend and you're margins just get smaller anyway. Bloggers who use AdSense get stuck even worse, they aren't getting organic link love and they are seeing the CPC decline as a flat out revenue decline. The trend to apps is to get away from that of course. Your app will always show your content. Sites like Reddit and HN become more relevant traffic generators. And "portal" type sites like Medium will provide variability with their 'stable' of writers. I totally agree with him that to "fix" this one has to go at it to build the thing they want. I'm guessing that is a combination of advertising and subscription revenue but we'll see.
- bootload 12y ago
  "CPC, RPM" acronym alert?
  - ydant 12y ago
    Pretty standard for anyone who follows anything about advertising: - CPC = Cost Per Click - RPM = Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions) Both the C and R are sometimes used interchangeably - e.g. "RPC" and "CPM" mean roughly the same thing. It really just depends on which entity and which way the money's flowing if you think of the players in an advertising game: [advertiser] -> [advertising platforms - e.g. Google] -> [publisher / traffic source] One player's cost is another player's revenue.
    - bootload 12y ago
      thx @ydant, never heard this before. Very nice way to describe the process.
omarrr 12y ago
> we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next this
dingaling 12y ago
What annoys me regarding Google and blogs is that content which is written on its own Blogger / Blogspot-hosted blogs is indexed and presented in the search results within minutes. Everyone else has to wait until the Googlebot ambles along some time later in the week.
merrua 12y ago
Google made it really hard to search for blogs or blog articles too. Which is annoying when you just want to check for articles on something by people rather than organisations.

76 points by dce 12y ago

The trend seems to be "blog + feed" all-in-one platforms like Medium.com now. The old blogging model was the feed readers were separate from the platforms. I'm not sure if that's better or worse but that seems to be all that's left.

api 12y ago
It's a continuation of the long-term and broad trend of silo-ization and movement to closed platforms.
eli 12y ago
Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s. I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.
- stevesearer 12y ago
  This is the reason I prefer that my readers subscribe to my opt-in weekly email newsletter rather than using Google Reader/RSS. They get a quick little digest of the top content from the previous week and click through if it looks interesting. RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in terms of people using and interacting with it.
  - eli 12y ago
    Yup, it's hard to beat email for engagement. Maybe really well executed push notifications.
- bonaldi 12y ago
  People love stripped-down versions: Instapaper, Pocket, Flipboard et al are all testament to that (as is AdBlock, to an extent) I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain. The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.

getdavidhiggins 12y ago

Why are we writing to please Google? Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See: http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494 http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494 It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb. The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve. IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there. http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.

rodgerd 12y ago
> IMHO, Marco's should never have to worry about traffic. You'd have thought the same about, say Metafilter, as well. But apparently not.
eveningcoffee 12y ago
Is Robert Scoble a fool? You need a Facebook account to access his content.
jarcane 12y ago
I can't make AdSense revenues from a Twitter account. In fact, if Twitter or Facebook suspect I'm a professional concern rather than simply an ordinary Joe, they may expect me to pay them money to promote my content, or even to make it visible. I already have dealt with exactly that on my 'regular Joe' FB account in the past, because I had pages for my book label attached. Thankfully they seem to have realized that there was zero traffic to them and stopped, but I still sometimes worry about how much of my stuff is actually being 'curated' out of my friends' feeds.

Yhippa 12y ago

What does the blog title mean?

bishnu 12y ago
Marco famously tweeted "Shit." when Apple introduced an Instapaper clone into iOS/Safari. He kinda re-uses it whenever a big company does something to squash smaller ones/individuals. It's tongue-in-cheek.
- BobMarz 12y ago
  Not that famously it seems. He frets about traffic decline and wants to be more widely read, yet his headlines have inside jokes?
bobbles 12y ago
He means it like "Shit, this could be bad" instead of "this is shit"

mp3file 12y ago

The sky is falling down!

eveningcoffee 12y ago
It appears that it is already down and is crushing bloggers into underground or into arms of few (one) big players.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Marco makes a solid point. The challenge for Google of course is that their CPC has been eroding for years now. That means the only way to make their number is to increase the available ad slots on the page, which pushes organic folks off the page. You can of course spend AdWords dollars and stay on the page, but then your RPM is offset by your ad spend and you're margins just get smaller anyway. Bloggers who use AdSense get stuck even worse, they aren't getting organic link love and they are seeing the CPC decline as a flat out revenue decline. The trend to apps is to get away from that of course. Your app will always show your content. Sites like Reddit and HN become more relevant traffic generators. And "portal" type sites like Medium will provide variability with their 'stable' of writers. I totally agree with him that to "fix" this one has to go at it to build the thing they want. I'm guessing that is a combination of advertising and subscription revenue but we'll see.

bootload 12y ago
"CPC, RPM" acronym alert?
- ydant 12y ago
  Pretty standard for anyone who follows anything about advertising: - CPC = Cost Per Click - RPM = Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions) Both the C and R are sometimes used interchangeably - e.g. "RPC" and "CPM" mean roughly the same thing. It really just depends on which entity and which way the money's flowing if you think of the players in an advertising game: [advertiser] -> [advertising platforms - e.g. Google] -> [publisher / traffic source] One player's cost is another player's revenue.
  - bootload 12y ago
    thx @ydant, never heard this before. Very nice way to describe the process.

omarrr 12y ago

> we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next this

dingaling 12y ago

What annoys me regarding Google and blogs is that content which is written on its own Blogger / Blogspot-hosted blogs is indexed and presented in the search results within minutes. Everyone else has to wait until the Googlebot ambles along some time later in the week.

merrua 12y ago

Google made it really hard to search for blogs or blog articles too. Which is annoying when you just want to check for articles on something by people rather than organisations.