You remember way back in the early ’00s when your favorite blogs posted a few times a day at most, had a handful of great writers, and were a joy to read. Then something happened. Your beloved Lifehacker got out of hand, and you couldn’t keep up. TechCrunch bombarded you with shallow coverage of every little funding round and seemed to create ten new scandals a day.
The story repeated itself over and over, and you turned to the filters of Twitter and Facebook to keep up on the news. I want you to do a little experiment, to confirm that you aren’t losing your mind.
Go back to that favorite blog you abandoned when you realized you couldn’t keep up. You’ll find that it posts between 40 and 100 things a day. It’s no coincidence. Let’s face it: no person can keep up with that kind of volume on more than one blog and stay sane. You might be able to follow one or two, but not much more than that if you have anything else to do during the day.
These blogs don’t do it for you. They do it for Google. They flood every keyword you might put into a search engine to deny that traffic to any blog that dares to compete with a low volume of high quality content.
I’m going to let you in on the dirty little secret: digital publishing lost its mind. The mind that kept the quality high and the volume low. The mind that cared about your time, and only shared the best with you. That mind is gone, lost in the mad dash for advertising dollars, trampled under diminishing CPMs and acquisitions that ripped editorial control away from the people who built your favorite sites.
Most top blogs don’t deserve the top slot anymore. All they do is generate a flood of shallow writing, hoping to collect all the traffic from people searching for news. I’ve seen this effect on a smaller scale when I write posts on events in the news. I’ll instantly get 20-100 hits on the topic, and enjoy a small spike in traffic over the following few days as the story runs its course. Now imagine you’re running a huge website with plenty of poorly or unpaid writers to flood every news topic with content.
Coverage of a single story could get thousands of dollars worth of ad impressions from the traffic on one of the bigger sites like Huffington Post. And the writers will see little if any of that money.
And it works. A blog with only a few hundred thousand readers might pop up in the #2 or #3 slot on Google, but the first result looks like a better match to most search engine users. If I ran a search engine, I would ban these sites from the index. Google and Bing can’t do that without drawing the gaze of regulators.
I have no solution to offer. I’ve thought about this for years, worked on ideas, and haven’t made any progress in breaking through the noise without doing the same thing the big sites do. This is an unhappy position for someone who’d like to make a living giving content away while making the money from ad dollars.
I don’t see a way to do that when an ad pays pennies for thousands of impressions. That means I have to link to my eBooks a lot since a single sale is worth thousands of ad impressions. I’d rather give them away.
Yes totally agree with you on this one it is a big issue. Information today is fresh but not really valuable. Disney bought Luckasfilm and now everything is flooded with this news. Sooner or later new media filtering system will emerge since google is broken and has it’s limit.
New media filtering emerged a long time ago – via crowdsourced voting – i.e. Digg, reddit etc. It’s no longer about creating content, it’s about creating quality content that spreads through social media sharing – that is the only way the little guy can compete with the big players.
Filtering information is a really big problem. For reading news I recomend using social services like Reddit or Hacker News.
Interesting points. Lately I get curated content via Twitter because I follow people I respect, people at the top of their game who retweet or favorite things that are actually valuable. I’ve found that to be a really valuable source.
Regarding your ebooks, it’s neat that you’ve published something, and I buy ebooks from upstart authors all the time, but what you’re offering wasn’t very compelling to me. I clicked through and saw titles that reminded me of a mix between Wikipedia articles and SEO blog titles. The covers were pretty simple, maybe too simple to back up the hard-hitting titles. There’s also only a one-star review available, which is kind of a bummer.
I wonder if you could benefit from joining an author’s group. I have a client who did this, and it gave her a huge head start in marketing and promotion.
I didn’t put as much effort into the covers as I should have. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best selling book has the best cover. And oddly, it sells about one copy a week at any price I’ve tried between $0.99 and $9.99.
I’ll take a look at updating the others with new covers. Changing the titles would be a little trickier since, from what I’ve heard, Amazon doesn’t like when you change titles on books. Maybe I’ll just unpublish them and do new editions with new titles.
Have you had a look at how @gruber and @marco monetize their blogs? Limited, quality posts and very low key sponsorship. Their topics might not be your cup of tea, but they’re on to something in terms of making a living writing on the web.
I’ll look in to that.
If you’re seeking original content, you might want to play with search engine millionshort*com… it strips out the SEO-oriented sites, leaving the people who write for the love of it.
(Or if you’d prefer further unhappiness, then take a look at how the markup on these commercials sites has changed, via httparchive*org… taking more resources to say less.)
Totally agree. The “megablogs” are just capitalizing on news because they make so much from advertising and news generates traffic. It’s unfortunate because now there’s so much noise that it’s hard to find the content that is truly valuable. That’s why I’ve tried not to write too much content that would be considered linkbait. It’s funny that Mashable is a big social media site but the content rarely is actual advice that’s actionable.
I have this vague recollection that Mashable used to be about mashup sites, which were a big trend for a while, but it seems like I imagined that.
Nice concise piece. I love RSS, but whenever I go hunting for fresh feeds every month or so, it’s so hard to find “that blog” – the one that’s consistent, fresh, and actually cares about the readers.
I think the future, for good or bad, is in integrated share-through advertising. It will take a really high level of trust from readers, but the current display/SEO model seems really broken.
Excellent piece. I love RSS – but whenever I got hunting for new feeds every month or so, it’s exasperating trying to find “that” blog by someone who really cares about their readers.
I think some new model of advertising is going to have to happen – whether it’s integrated, share-through,performance, or something. The current Display/SEO model is just not working.
Beyond that there is plenty of republishing of original content with syndication sites pulling info from rss feed, and these syndicators can end up ranking higher because they receive more backlinks. Liked your use of the word filters, by the way.
Have you tried skimfeed? It gives an overview of the tech news sites. Google it.
i wanted to add that more people access the web so more content is offered.maybe that has to do with something.
Yet another reason Google is losing its relevancy. Who would’ve thunk it?
True indeed. It has become really hard to draw attention to one small website in such a huge web world.
I tend to use Google Reader to manage my RSS feeds, but even then I find myself swamped in useless articles. Reddit goes a long way to providing a useful filter since I can restrict my interest to particular themes in my life.
In your article you mentioned you were seeking an alternative way to get paid for your blogging. You might want to consider adding a Bitcoin donate link. I’ve got one, and you can see how to do it here: http://gary-rowe.com/agilestack/2012/01/09/how-to-accept-bitcoins-on-your-blog-with-no-code/
Last time I checked, there was no good (safe, convenient) way to convert bitcoin to USD. The flattr button is how I take donations, and no one donates with it. I don’t think I want to add more complexity and hazard to the process.
When did you last check, if you don’t mind my asking? CampBX offers a high-security USA-based exchange that might suit your needs: https://campbx.com.
Regarding Flattr, I had to look very hard to find it – perhaps you should highlight it a little more.
Tell you what – if you decide to trial a Bitcoin approach, let me know (I’m monitoring replies to this comment) and I’ll drop a coin or two your way so you can see if it suits you. If it’s a rubbish experience then you’ve got yourself some new material for your blog.
I haven’t paid much attention to it since it started making news. My impression of bitcoin security comes from a few high profile bitcoin heists. I want it exist for a while to develop good standard practices (especially security) before I invest much time in it.
I see where you’re coming from with the security side of things now. Yes, things have moved on significantly. All the major Bitcoin clients now come with encrypted wallets as standard so your bitcoins are as safe as they can be on your own machine. Some clients even offer brain wallets, but that is for another discussion.
When it comes to third parties looking after your bitcoins (online wallets, exchanges and so on) then you should exercise caution just as you would with anyone trusted with looking after your money. Of course you don’t need to use these services to accept bitcoins – you can just generate an address from your own machine. Once you’ve amassed a suitable pile and want to cash out then you simply use a secure exchange like CampBX – or help grow the Bitcoin economy by purchasing goods and services with them instead.
Anyway, I just thought I’d bring this alternative to your attention. I don’t want to hijack your comment stream with it.
The number of people clicking through to your blog post tells me there’s interest in it, so a short discussion on it can’t hurt.
I was just in a course today at a university, where I spoke exactly about this. More specifically, how Google’s ad business model is sustainable when the web is anything but organized (thus, a mess).
Interestingly enough, Google’s major flaw is in social, where Facebook is the clear winner, and in my opinion will continue to be, mostly because of who runs the company (a founder like Zuckerberg at Facebook is like Steve Jobs was at Apple; money is a second priority, the product is the first, and he’s the final decision maker, always).
I believe content will finally be organized if it is within a controlled environment, and that is a portal, not the www in its full extent. And with so much “big data” about people in Facebook, they are in a position to give you almost perfectly what you’re looking for, WHEN they go seriously into the search engine business (within Facebook). Yes, it’ll have to be inside Facebook, but at least it’ll be organized, neat and tidy. Or I hope so, anyway.
By the way, I found this page by searching “the web is a mess” in Google.