MARKET FACTS

COMMENT: Yes, you read it right. Practically the majority of content in the world is getting ZERO organic traffic from the big G company. This means that only a handful of businesses and brands in the WORLD are actually getting free, organic traffic from Google — who owns over 90% of the search engine market worldwide. Now, if Google owns that much of the search market, and only 9% of the content in the world is getting organic traffic, without a doubt this should be a big red alert to you. Why? Because first of all, Google should not be trusted as a steady source of traffic. Not if you are a business at least. But let’s give you some perspective, shall we? Reason #1: 40% of Google searches result in ZERO clicks because Google is answering them. That’s a big problem by itself, proving that Google’s intent is to somehow answer as many queries as possible on its own. The ones Google cannot answer, they’ll use feature snippets to steal your clicks forcing users to stay on Google instead of giving websites a visit. And because brands/companies/SEOs are too stupid to realize that feature snippets area actually working against them, they’ve been putting the effort into ranking for “position zero”, thinking it will help their brand in the long-term. Wrong. Google is just using its dominant position to force brands to give their content for free in exchange for a little bit of traffic. Next? Reason #2: Google’s new algorithm creates original articles from your content (BIG red alert!). More evidence proving the last point. Think. If Google already has this level of dominance regarding monopolizing online traffic, then imagine what will happen to the global market since they now can “read” content, “learn” from it, then produce NEW content just like us humans do, thereby becoming another publisher (thanks to A.I.)? Who would win the content war? How much more scarce will attention to businesses become? But wait, because there’s more. Reason #3: Google Makes Push to Turn Product Searches into Cash. This means that Google is aiming to make money from those searches going to businesses that have strong buying intent behind them. That’s OBVIOUS since Google is a BUSINESS. It’s not a public service. It’s a business. A business that dominates over 90% of the search market worldwide. Nevertheless, they want to monetize as many sources of traffic as possible, as they’re providing value to other businesses by sending them traffic. This is 2+2 folks. There’s not much to think about here. And since Google and Facebook own 84% of digital ad dollars worldwide, there’s not much room left for growth, is there? There is, however, room for growth for Google in one last place: charging money from everything that is currently free, like organic traffic. Think about that.

COMMENT: That’s right. You read it right. Pretty isn’t? Let’s put the very words used by Slate one more time, to give you a quick idea of how much “money” Apple News is “giving” to publishers today, making them starve to death: “Slate makes more money from a single article that gets 50,000 page views on its site than it does from the 6 million page views it receives on Apple News in an average month” — SOURCE: Slate – Apple News is giving the media everything it wants — except money. Obviously, this is not a one-case story. The Guardian already removed itself from Apple News as well: “We have run extensive trials on Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News to assess how they fit with our editorial and commercial objectives. Having evaluated these trials, we have decided to stop publishing in those formats on both platforms…” – SOURCE: Digiday – The Guardian pulls out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. Next time you think about putting money and effort into Apple News, think twice. Better yet, never think about it anymore.

COMMENT: Complementary data: The average watch time for a mobile user is 60 minutes per day which reinforces that videos with less than 1 hour will likely be consumed by the Youtube audience, while bigger videos than that, will likely not. Of course, this is just additional data that should be taken into account, but not taken as a rule. Depending on your niche — like E-learning — you may very well publish 2-hour long videos and still win because your audience definitely expects in-depth content. Finally, another important data is that in an average month, 8 out of 10 people — ages 18 to 49 years old — watch Youtube proving that you can reach your audience whether you are marketing to younger or older people. And with the explosion of SmartTVs, and with many of them becoming much cheaper, that statistic will likely increase in the near future (since SmartTVs usually have the Youtube App).

COMMENT: JP Morgan & Chase had ads on 400,000 websites. Then just on 5,000. And they got the same results. This is a critical fact exposing how the advertising industry is infested with ad fraud, robots and every other criminal activity that drain marketing budgets from companies on a daily basis. The famous Methbot case where hackers made $5 MILLION dollars per day by faking 300M video views was already something hard to swallow for the industry. Then there was the case of a Business Insider advertiser who thought they had purchased $40,000 worth of ad inventory through the open exchanges when in reality, the publication only saw $97 indicating the rest of the money went to fraud. And now this. And don’t you forget about all the additional facts exposed in Market Facts #4. Bottom line? Save your money. Because now ad fraud is the favorite activity of some professional criminals due to the high ROI compared with extorsion or counterfeiting goods.

COMMENT: Complementary facts: around 23% of the remaining robot traffic comes from good bots such as crawlers from search engines and bots used by professional web tools for monitoring or data extraction purposes, while the rest (29%), is from bad robots like impersonators, scrapers, spammers and hackers tools. PS: This latest survey was based on an analysis of nearly 17 billion website visits from across 100,000 domains. A quick example on how impersonators can work in practice: on Twitter, bots are being used to spread information on the French presidential campaign with 5% of the accounts tweeting a related hashtag making 40% of that hashtag’s tweets. That’s one example. Other bot impersonators may pretend to be using a certain browser with a faked header and everything to deceive your Google Analytics filters for a shady purpose. Others, may use social accounts to like posts and follow accounts automatically to inflate the following of the likes such as celebrities, TV stars, professional athletes, actors etc. Just on Facebook alone, there are around 60 MILLION fake automated accounts already. Just know this: human traffic is the minority now.

COMMENT: Some SEO experts advise brands to use rich snippets as a way to get Google to rank them in the top first results. However, as you can see this is stupid because Google is using your content to answer many questions by itself. I personally click on a snippet of a website once every 15 TIMES I get a snippet as an answer. Gather these facts and put together with the reality that Google’s search market share is 91% by March 2018 (worldwide) and you’ll realize why most companies have a real problem today when it comes to bringing customers via content in search results.

COMMENT: Now, how serious do you think this is once you find out that Google is giving brands robot traffic and therefore, also fake clicks in return for their money? Maybe after you find out that Facebook’s ad reach “estimative” is LARGER than the actual population alive in some countries you’ll see the big problematic picture. Especially when Facebook has over 10 metrics errors that few companies knew about all these years. So besides this duopoly taking over the majority of all ad dollars available, it’s also not delivering as promised to its customers anymore.

COMMENT: Another important point: If Americans over 50 were a country by themselves, they would be the 3rd largest economy in the world AND they’re only targeted by 5% of all US adverts. Businesses should pay attention to these facts because there’s no point in pursuing other demographic classes too much if they won’t be able to pay you for your product/service once your marketing hits. Plus, brands are spending too much already in customer acquisition which is about to become the next big marketing problem for companies. Your company is feeding the marketing machine but when there’s a sale, your cost per acquisition is just not worth the hustle. That’s what companies are going through nowadays because the reality is that the real money, the kind of money that can keep businesses alive, is going to fewer hands. The World’s 500 Richest people saw their wealth increase by 1 TRILLION in 2017. Paying attention to what demographic can actually grow your business is critical for success in bad economic times.

COMMENT: Independent Media and the EU economy will suffer now that there’s a political crackdown on data due to data misuse of tech behemoths like Google and Facebook. The Market found out about Google tracking your location even when location services are disabled, or Facebook’s famous Cambridge Analytica scandal (which apparently wasn’t enough since we now also know that Facebook collects your phone records and text messages as well). Those companies grew because of data. But the newest competitors aren’t having the same chance because of their errors and mistakes. Finally, add the famous General Data Protection Regulation destructive force to the mix and you have a real problem for data-based European Startups and consequently, for the EU economy at the end of the day. The scenario is too problematic already. This is why european regulators are getting a lot of heat from advertising experts for killing the media industry. Good thing startups are fighting (and winning) in court in order to use data from big social networks.

COMMENT: There are a few reasons for this. Due to lack of trust in Social Networks’ algorithms by normal users when it comes to deliverability is one. Second, youngsters are leaving those social networks because their grandparents are liking their pictures, or employers are using Facebook to investigate them for a job application. Third, because social networks cannot beat instant messaging if you want people to actually engage. This is why CEOs share content usually via Email. Here’s a breakdown with France, Australia, Europe, UK and North America for this along with an image categorized by content categories like News, Health, Sports, Religion, Fitness etc.