Google Zero is a Lie
There is a narrative in publishing that Google traffic will mostly disappear. The real-world data strongly contradicts this. Accepting the Google Zero narrative is extremely dangerous.
There is a pervasive narrative doing the rounds in the publishing industry, called ‘Google Zero’. This narrative, embraced by many industry leaders, poses that traffic from Google - search and Discover - will decline and eventually become negligible.
Kyle Sutton
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Mar 2
Great stuff as always, Barry.
A note on the Chartbeat data as I also messaged that here @ WaPo: the November YoY comparison is a really poor one, given 2024 was a U.S. presidential election. All publishers are going to see relative decline from that huge news moment. If you do a more apropos YTD comparison (Jan-Nov), the delta's more like -15%; not -33%. Context is so important.
Deborah Carver
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Mar 2
I have been waiting for someone to shoot holes in the Google Zero narrative, especially around Chartbeat data, which has been the source for more false publisher theories in the past 10 years than I can count.
Publishers have a habit of looking at the easily packaged narrative instead of thinking critically about their own brand performance, and then only talking with other publishers... instead of the many other business verticals that primarily exist online. It's an extrapolation of journalists whose only friends are other journalists... at some point in your adult life, you have to expand your worldview by talking to people from different fields in a non-transactional capacity (i.e., outside of building a story).
If there are 30 prominent organic digital strategies across all the industries who are invested in building business online, publishers typically use about 5 of them and ignore the rest. In my view, it's ego more than anything... publishers feel entitled to user attention that they haven't bothered to earn.
I like The Verge, but agree that they're weirdly reticent to acknowledge that organizing and optimizing their content for different kinds of audiences could help their business.
