So - I had a mate that built an application that made it trivial to deploy a niche ebay site with tens of thousands of pages. He had an insane number of them - and briefly got his revenue upwards around two hundred k per year (tho panda kicked in before a year of that income level was achieved). Google raped his servers indexing all his pages and sent him an enormous amount of traffic.
This was the long tail. Folks trying to get to a place that have the niche item they are looking for - having to wade through an endless see of affiliate sites to get there.
Now ignoring for the moment Aaron Wall's thesis that this is all part of Google shitting on the little guy - here's an undeniable fact:
The proliferation and sophistication of affiliate spammers made it impossible for Google to continue taking chances on 'unknowns' that hadn't previously done the work of establishing themselves. Hence the reliance on brand strength that Google was forced to turn to.
This is unfortunate. It was wonderful to see so many deserving people getting ahead and building new brands on account of the relative freedom Google granted to the long tail previously. But making it so cheap and easy to get ahead in this way attracted a zillion folks that just wanted to suck as much juice from the system.
Does that mean Aaron Wall and others are wrong about Google intentions? (i.e. to keep users within their own garden) Probably not... But I think the onus on folks like Aaron Wall to provide a positive account of what else Google could have done. Otherwise, I remain convinced that Google was heading into Yahoo and Myspace land if they hadn't made the changes they have.
This was the long tail. Folks trying to get to a place that have the niche item they are looking for - having to wade through an endless see of affiliate sites to get there.
Now ignoring for the moment Aaron Wall's thesis that this is all part of Google shitting on the little guy - here's an undeniable fact:
The proliferation and sophistication of affiliate spammers made it impossible for Google to continue taking chances on 'unknowns' that hadn't previously done the work of establishing themselves. Hence the reliance on brand strength that Google was forced to turn to.
This is unfortunate. It was wonderful to see so many deserving people getting ahead and building new brands on account of the relative freedom Google granted to the long tail previously. But making it so cheap and easy to get ahead in this way attracted a zillion folks that just wanted to suck as much juice from the system.
Does that mean Aaron Wall and others are wrong about Google intentions? (i.e. to keep users within their own garden) Probably not... But I think the onus on folks like Aaron Wall to provide a positive account of what else Google could have done. Otherwise, I remain convinced that Google was heading into Yahoo and Myspace land if they hadn't made the changes they have.