The Google Paradox
How do you manage a business when the very thing that makes money for you hurts your profits at the same time? This is the dilemma that Google has been struggling with several years now, and it’s not likely to go away soon.
Imagine if you will that you are a content publisher, say, an online magazine. Now imagine that you have your “A” articles that your writers spent a lot of time on and that are very in-depth, and that your readers love. Now imagine that you have your “C” articles that aren’t so good, but because they suck, your readers are much more likely to click on the ads on those articles. Believe it or not, if a page has lousy content, users are indeed much more likely to click on an ad. I’ve seen seen sites with lousy content get up to a 12% clickthrough as compared to high-quality content that gets 1-2% CTR.
Now imagine that you get paid per click.
Which articles would you promote at the front of your magazine? A article or C articles? The A’s are great, but they just don’t pay the bills, let alone pay for themselves. The C’s pay well, but get no repeat traffic.This is exactly the paradox that Google faces every day. They can send their users to quality sites with great articles like Creating Passionate Users or uncov, or they can send traffic to sites with questionable content where users are more likely to click on ads because there’s nothing else to do like Associated Content or Squidoo.
Google runs their AdSense ads on virtually every content site on the web these days, so they make money when they send their traffic to the sites that have the best clickthrough rates.
So what is Google to do? They should certainly try to avoid any perception of impropriety. Apparently they’ve started penalizing pages on Squidoo in order to do just that. But going forward, how do they draw the line? How do they look impartial? How do they assure us that the brick wall between editorial (in their case, search) and sales that every good publisher must have is still in place? How do we know that they’re sending us to the best sites and not the ones that make the most money for them?
The answer is, we probably won’t know until someone starts giving better search results than Google.
Explore posts in the same categories: Internet, Search
July 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Question: If the “A” articles are significantly better than the “C” articles, aren’t the “A” ones likely to draw more traffic and eyeballs than the “C” ones? If so, could that ratio be as much as 6 to 1, thereby making this somewhat of a wash? IOW, even though the click-thru rate may be significantly less for pages with great content, do you make it up in volume of readers?
July 18th, 2007 at 10:16 am
It certainly is not guaranteed that a “better” article gets more pageviews. Because the content we’re talking about has been optimized for search, a C article that is search-optimized is likely to get much more traffic than an A article that is not optimized (all other factors being equal like site popularity, etc.)
This is mostly an issue on smaller sites that don’t have a lot of natural traffic, but drive most of their traffic from search. Obviously it would not hold true for a site like CNN or Salon where most of the traffic is natural. These sites have their own decisions to make because the articles about Paris Hilton get more traffic than those about politics or world affairs… Associated Content, for instance, is a site that until recently had almost no brand awareness and drove the vast majority of its traffic from search, so they have no motivation to encourage their writers to produce “quality” writing, but they do have motivation to encourage them to write search-optimized articles. Browse their article database for a while and you’ll see what I mean. Those articles get good traffic from search AND because of their mediocre quality get good click-through rates.