E-E-A-T It Google

Is Google Slowly Killing Blogging?

First up is a debate started by Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits, who’s obviously feeling pretty annoyed at Google’s recent updates and (in his view) war against niche sites and blogging in general.

We’re not sure that there’s an intent to kill smaller sites, just that they’re collateral damage in Google’s attempt to keep searchers on its site (by providing answers directly for example).

What is clear though is that small sites will find it harder and harder to attract organic search traffic, and so will need to find other ways to drive traffic. Newsletters for example…

Market Update

This week, Duuce reported 13 new digital media listings that came onto the marketplaces, spread evenly across the major platforms:

‘Reddit Can Survive Without Search’

Another war currently raging in online media is between content providers/forums such as Quora, and generative AI companies such as OpenAI.

The former accuses the latter of ‘stealing’ its content when its bots crawl content sites to feed its machine learning algorithms.

One potential measure being considered by Reddit is to close off its site to crawlers. But this would also have the effect of closing off Reddit to Bing and Google, both of which use crawlers to compile search results.

It seems (or at least they claim) that they are able to survive without search, presumably because users go straight to its site and their favourite subreddits.

Anyway, here’s more:

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$150M+ Revenue Content Site

Last week we highlighted Glen Allsopp featuring the UK’s NerdWallet equiavelent MoneySuperMarket with its Q3 revenues, and now is the turn for the US-based competitor itself:

70% of NerdWallet’s traffic is organic, and its monthly users are up 22% YoY due to its travel and loans content ranking better.

Google certainly isn’t killing huge sites.

Newsletter Shoutout of the Week