[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This is the first show of the year after a nice break. Hope you all enjoyed it.
I wanna evolve this podcast in twenty twenty-five, particularly with adding guests who are part of what I call the information space. I mean, media isn't dying, it's just changing.
So I wanna focus on those running established media brands, but also add in newcomers. And I'd love your input on candidates. I wanna talk to new people and learn new things.
My email for any ideas you have is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Also, just send me a note with any feedback you have.
This week, I am kicking off a miniseries that will run through January of sort of year-end preview episodes. I plan on talking to an expert in various critical areas for the year ahead.
And to kick things off, I am joined this week by Mike Malozzo, a veteran of media and commerce who writes the excellent Zero Clicks newsletter. I will include a link to it in the show notes.
I highly recommend you checking it out. Mike is immersed in the details of affiliate, AKA commerce media, which became a critical part of many publisher revenue models over the last few years.
That is, until Google decided it would stop turning a blind eye to the, shall we say, expansive license many publishers took in their affiliate operations.
Mike and I discuss who will emerge as winners and who will end up as losers as the chaos continues to rule the SERP, and whether this means an end to a very nice arbitrage scheme at a time when publishers could really use low effort, high margin revenue.
I really enjoyed this conversation. Before we get to it, I wanna tell you a little bit about the Rebooting show's sponsor, Exco.
This episode is brought to you by Exco, the machine learning video platform trusted by leading media groups like Advance Local, The Arena Group, Hearst Newspapers, Nasdaq, News Corp, and more.
Exco recently partnered with Rebooting to create a new industry report that is called The State of Video Publishing Strategies.
This explores the results of a survey in which we interviewed 50 media company executives about their video strategies and approaches to monetization.
They were really forthcoming, and I thought the results were really fascinating. Of course, I'm a little biased.
So if you wanna know what is shaping the future of video publishing in twenty twenty-five, go and access the report today from therebooting.com.
And to learn more about how Exco is helping publishers maximize yield and engage audiences with video, visit Exco. That is E-X dot C-O. Thank you to my friends at Exco. Now on to my conversation with Mike.
[upbeat music] Mike, thank you so much for, for joining me here. Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be here. Zero Clicks is, is one of my favorite newsletters to get.
You're a good writer, you know exactly what you're talking about, and that combination is, is lethal. So please keep it up. I'll take it. I'm having fun doing it, so I think that's what, that's what counts.
And I love talking with people who know way more about shit than I do, and so I really wanna go into what is happening right now in, in the world of, like, commerce media.
I'm gonna use a lot of air quotes that people can't see because it's a podcast. Yeah.
But it's also known as affiliate, and to me, the rise of affiliate's been, been fascinating because I've been covering this industry for too freaking long, I gotta be hon-honest with you, Mike.
[laughs] And, like, affiliate was always just the sketchiest, like, part of the, this industry. There was like...
There would be, like, affiliate cruises that were [chuckles] were filled with, with all kinds of people who had, like, one foot out the door and were often based in unfashionable parts of Florida.
That's how you knew they had some kind of scammy business. Yeah.
Anyone who walked the floor of the Ad Tech Conference, that's Ad and then the colon Tech, that still had, like, booth babes well into the, like, late two thousand tens, you know, the affiliate section was always the, the sort of grimiest part, right?
And of course, this being digital media, it's incredibly lucrative, 'cause the, the more grotesque you get- [laughs]... the better it is. And, and publishers notice that. I mean, this is...
Affiliate is a true internet native business model, and, you know, publishers in recent years really went hard into affiliate.
A-and to me, it usually comes down to the fact that it's the, it's the weakness of the ad ecosystem. Programmatic was a disaster for publishers. I think we're allowed to say that now.
And, and so they're looking for different ways to make money. They, they hate the fact that they don't have control over their business, and, like, affiliate seemed like it was, like, great. We've got these brands.
We can adapt the same processes, and some of them made it. But Google in the last year is basically changing the bargain, right?
So give me just your overview of what is happening with Google a-and the fundamental bargain that, that had always sort of undergirded the, the internet. Yeah, of course.
First off, it's funny you mention the, the sort of late twenty tens booth girls. I was invited to speak at an affiliate conference for the first time about six years ago.
Uh, I walked in the door, and within maybe 45 seconds, the first person that approached me was selling mesothelioma lawsuit leads, and the second person- Oh, yeah. Those are always the most expensive.
The, the mesothelioma, like, keyword was- Yep... like, legendary.
They, they got me, like, right at the front door of this hotel, and the second person was selling some kind of a Trump ICO project in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, two years after those things- Yeah...
had kinda gone out of vogue. I wonder if, if he held that coin. I wonder how it's doing now.
But yeah, all kind of sketchy conferences aside, I think it, it, it's interesting if you think about what Google has done, but taking even a bigger step back, I think people treat affiliate marketing and commerce media, or whatever vernacular you wanna use, as if it's some sort of really complex, esoteric thing in its own sort of channel siloed world, when it, it's really not.
All affiliate is, is a payment modelAnd as a payment model, it's the least publisher-friendly and most advertiser-friendly payment model that exists, right? Yeah.
Publishers are only paid a very small percentage of driving a transaction. Advertisers get to pay pennies on the dollar. No risk for the advertisers. No risk for the advertiser. This sounds pretty, pretty good.
Pennies on the dollar. Everybody wins. Why the hell not? Customer vending machine. G- god, I lo- I would love it. Exactly. I'll feed quarters into a customer vending machine all day.
[laughs] So I think the, the sort of operative question is, is why the hell did publishers get into this space in the... or get into this kind of racket in the first place? Yeah.
And the answer is, is the great advantage that affiliate and commerce media afforded publishers for a time, is you could sort of sidestep the whole adventure of having to build a brand and having to build reader loyalty.
Because it was so no regrets for an advertiser, you could spin up a publication overnight. If you were good at arbitrage, you could start generating hundreds of thousands- Yeah...
to millions of dollars in a very, very short period of time. Well, how many mattress, uh, review sites that, that were there at the peak? Right.
The, I think, 2017 Fast Company called The War to Sell You a Mattress: An Internet Nightmare, and it only got bigger for the next five or six years until Google rolled out some of their, their sort of algo changes.
So I think that's the really interesting thing is, is in an era of mass scale and an era of mass arbitrage, affiliate was the quickest way to make money.
And both very scrappy independent publishers and, you know, some of the biggest media conglomerates under the sun gravitated towards it because I think, you know, because of the sort of quick win potential.
The other thing, as you alluded to, was, you know, what I wrote about in Zero Clicks is I think Google sort of had an unwritten bargain that they made with publishers, which is, "Hey, we essentially upended the very fabric of this business that existed throughout the 20th century.
As a result, we're gonna give you some pennies back on the dollar and ignore some of the sort of SEO and, and growth hacky schemes that existed on the margin around things like newspapers hosting coupon sites, around- Oh, yeah...
things like people reviewing mattresses that they had never slept on," right? Google was kinda like, "You know what? It's fine. We're a monopoly. It's not gonna hurt our business. You'll make a little bit of money back."
But the way I see it is, is Google is feeling existential fear for the first time. They're feeling that, those very quiet footsteps of competition.
And as a result, they wanna close some of the loopholes that have existed in this space.
And as kind of mafia-esque as their old terms with publishers were, where they were willing to kind of let publishers make a few million dollars doing affiliate arbitrage to replace tens of millions of dollars in classifieds and advertising revenue, even that is off the table now if, in Google's view, it, it hurts the user experience, and in Google's view, makes it, you know, kind of introduces arbitrary friction into the process.
I will confess to, to many publishers listening, that's a very Google-friendly way of describing what's going on, but I'm just trying to get in the beast's head a little bit to try to- Yeah...
understand why Google would suddenly nerf an ecosystem that has existed for so long. Well, I mean, let's face it, like, I've always said this, like, Google had a really difficult job.
I mean, look, being a monopolist is difficult. It's hard because you got a lot of constituencies. I mean, it doesn't really matter because you don't have to answer to anyone.
But, like, you get a lot of constituencies that you're trying to keep in some kinda uneasy equilibrium, right? Right. And so the reality is publishers...
You know, I remember any time I'd get on the phone as a reporter, like, as a cub reporter with some Google product manager, you know, I'd always have, like, 23 minutes. They would spend...
They would waste, like, 15 minutes with a preamble about how everything they do is looking out for the users, the advertisers, and, and publishers.
And I thought that order was very interesting because it never s- it was always [chuckles] publishers were always last. Yeah. And let's be real, they're always going to be last.
I mean, that's why I like the, the name of your newsletter. Yeah.
[laughs] Again- Zero Clicks is, like, you know, the fact that Google has increasingly increased the number of searches that do not result in a click, because the, it's not necessarily in their interest.
But they're always trying to so- keep publishers unhappy enough, but, like, they have to keep producing the stuff.
And so they're gonna turn a blind eye to all of the kind of, like, shortcut, hacky stuff that publishers, you know, did, uh, you know, what time does the Super Bowl start crap and whatnot.
But the problem is the incentives were such that it started to really affect the core Google product, right? Yep. I mean, like, anyone who has used Search has seen its utility go down.
I mean, the fact that people have to put Reddit on the end of searches i- is, is a testament to it. That is like the ski- the, the skip to recipe button. That's a sign that something is wrong. Yeah.
And I think so, I mean, it's funny you mentioned that Google product managers would say the ranking was users, advertisers, and then publishers.
Any user of the product would've said the ranking was advertisers all the way- Yeah. They, they understood. [laughs]...
to the top of the stratosphere, and then somewhere at the very bottom of the mountain, users were maybe one step above publishers.
Again, to, to Google's very modest credit, it does feel like i- in their own sort of mind, there is a major move to course correct some of that. Now, it's limited to a degree, right?
Your first page of search is still mostly AdWords with the odd AI overview above it, right? There's only so much kind of financial risk that Google is going to take.
But I think one of the, you know, in Google's mind, very obvious poor user experiences were, again, some of these sort of arbitrary friction experiences that got introduced into commerce media, whether it be, you know, again, coupons that publishers would, would kind of publish lists of, whether it be brands doing wildly illogical brand extensions, right?
You know, maybe technology- This is the Forbes commercial just sponsored... publishers. Yeah, this is, exactly. Whether it was done by a third party- I was on that page. I clicked on that.
I'm gonna be followed around forever now. Thanks, Mike. [laughs] Yeah. No, you know, it is what it is.
But again, I think the most important sort of concept at the heart of this whole discussion is that-Without huge arbitrage opportunities, affiliate is a bad business model.
And I think we're in this really interesting lull in the ecosystem where there just isn't a lot of arbitrage left, whether that arbitrage comes from organic traffic or buying search and social traffic for less money than you can make on affiliate commissions.
We had sort of a 10-year golden era of arbitrage that made affiliate a great business model. I'm sure we'll have it again in five to 10 years. Like, the growth hackers always find a way. I, I will- Yeah...
update you guys- My, my money is always on arb. I don't know. Like I, [chuckles] maybe it's getting older, but... [chuckles] But we're in a lull.
There, you know, it's, the, the economics of the internet are such right now that, that the- Yeah...
obvious arbitrage opportunities are hard, and that makes affiliate businesses that were built on, on those opportunities less valuable.
Conversely, though, I actually think it makes the crème de la crème of commerce media businesses far more valuable than ever. So explain, explain that, because- Yeah...
like I, I always think, like, when we talk about commerce, that's why I use the air quotes, 'cause I, I even joke, it's like when people mean commerce, they really mean affiliate, and when people say affiliate, they really mean SEO.
[chuckles] And like, you know, it's like we put a lot of like names on these things, and I think, you know, when people say commerce media, I, I, I think of like Wirecutter, right?
People go back to Wirecutter and, you know, it's, it's now been almost like a decade that The New York Times like bought it. It was only $30 million, which is kinda crazy to think.
And it was treated as this massive win for Brian Lam, which, you know, was, 'cause he bootstrapped it, but still, it's way more, it was way more valuable than that.
But the reality is the incentives are such that it always goes to arbitrage, right?
Like it's do you really wanna build like some kinda testing facility or, or whatnot, or do you wanna take your brand, and you've established a lot of authority to it, and the incentives are such to sh- to, to see how elastic that brand is.
And, and next thing you know, you're, you're, y- you're like me and you're, you're clicking on a link in your newsletter and you ended up on a Forbes e- erectile dysfunction page. Yeah, maybe.
That's, that's potentially a myopic way of thinking about it. Like, I actually, if, if, if I were at The New York Times, I would absolutely love the position that Wirecutter is in right now, because- Yeah...
Wirecutter has established quite a bit of trust with its readers over the course of, you know, the several years it was independent and now eight or nine years of New York Times ownership.
They extended the brand probably a little bit further than, than maybe they should have in terms of some of what they reviewed, but they remained relatively true to their core.
A lot of the publishers that were mostly, to your point, SEO shops that were competing against them have decreased in, in viability over the last several years.
And Wirecutter and Consumer Reports and, and the sort of elite commerce publisher share of direct traffic has gone up quite a bit as, you know, people actually try to seek out what they deem to be- Right.
Well, I guess what I meant was- Yeah... was, was not, was that those publications that are, are... I think one of the things is the incentives, right? Right.
And like Google sets the incentives, and it's really difficult to set the right incentives, right? And it seems to me like the incentives clearly were, like most of digital media, to take the shortcut. Right.
Like it's to look for the short term.
I mean, otherwise, we wouldn't have had all those mattress review sites that- Well, and I guess maybe I'm trying to put on rose-colored glasses here, but I think the, the silver lining here is I think the incentive structure is better, right?
Okay. Imagine you are an executive at Wirecutter today.
Is it more valuable to drive a couple of additional affiliate commissions where you might make 10% to 20% of a $100 sale, or is it more valuable to hook in a really sort of wealthy yuppie reader from Green Point with a consumer product review that you can potentially upsell into- Mm-hmm...
a New York Times bundle recipes and games by making that person a really loyal reader of Wirecutter, which now exists as a, a tab from The New York Times home screen.
So, you know, I think whereas, you know, three to five years ago, the incentives might have been, let's try to milk a little bit more performance marketing or affiliate money out of a commerce media property, the incentives are starting to kind of move towards how can this be a way to really kind of delight readers that gets monetized in far more lucrative ways?
Not every company has that luxury, right? Not every company is The New York Times. Not every company has a massive subscription business like Consumer Reports, which is a, a nonprofit that effectively prints cash.
You know, not every product review business ladders up to something bigger.
But if I, if you think about where this industry is headed, you know, if I were on the corp dev or M&A team at a large retailer and there was a publisher that always wrote in-depth reviews of my products, like I'll use Lowe's or Home Depot as an example.
If there was a publisher that reviewed esoteric HVAC equipment or lumber or semi-gloss paint that had had a nice little affiliate business one to two years ago that got hurt by Google, I'd potentially be really interested in picking something like that up as a, as a acquisition vehicle for my retailer brand.
But if that company was doing weird performance marketing arbitrage schemes, they have no value to me, right? They only have value if they were kind of creating truly world-class commerce media.
So I think the nice thing about what Google has done somewhat inadvertently and probably accidentally is they've actually, in this sort of perverse and weird way, rewarded the somewhat small echelon of creators and publishers in the space that do great work, and might not be as good as the arbitrage games at, at some of the, the other shops.
So that's interesting you say that, 'cause like I, I, I try to follow, you know, winners and losers in this, and it seems like, it's like the, the, quote-unquote, "small mom and pop," right, you know, they claim that they're getting like, you know, wiped out in favor of, you know, the Dotdash Merediths, right?
And then, y- you know, I talk with Dotdash Meredith and they're like, "These, these are s- these are scammers. These, these are, these are the low... [chuckles] The, you know, this is not mom and pop."
Like, you know, uh, they're not testing the pro... Et cetera.
And I think it's, it's a really difficult to, to understand, first of all, who the winners and losers are and, and why the people are winning are winning.Yeah. It is multifaceted, right?
Because you have a number of indie publishers that have essentially been eviscerated by Google changes, you have all of the businesses that use third-party content marketplaces and freelancers that have been, in some cases, borderline delisted, and then most of the large enterprise commerce content businesses are down.
So it's, it's a little bit of this, like who is actually winning? I mean, Quora and Reddit are winning, right? That, that's obvious. Yeah. Random bullshit is winning. Asinine crap is winning.
But I think that's a, a sort of bug in the machine that will start to get filtered out- Wait, what is-... over the course of the next year... what is the random bullshit?
I mean, you have [laughs] I mean, the, the most egregious example I think that I saw recently was a, an LSU sports fan community- Oh, yeah. I saw that... um, ranking for, for personal finance, right?
You have just some of these like old, old- That just seemed like a, a, a quirk. Yeah. But it's happening in more places than it should be. It's not... It's a little bigger- Yeah... than a rounding error right now.
But yeah, I mean, to, to, to what we've been talking about, again, what I think is losing is commerce media as a standalone business model, right? Because it was dependent- Mm...
to a large degree on an arbitrage window that has temporarily closed.
Who I do kind of feel will win in the, in the, in the long term, given the return of M&A activity, given the pickup in retail media networks, at some point if retail media wants to be media, they're gonna have to have content.
But like real content. Like I guess- Real content, right... the part...
Like I, I, maybe a hopeful view of, of what you're, you're saying, at least the way I understand it, is that, look, the, the incentives were there to...
This was a side hustle for a lot of, let's just say, stick with the big publishers, right? A lot of big publishers, it was a side hustle.
It was like, I've never, in my time of, of covering this industry, I've never met like, the most dangerous place is to be standing between like a publisher and, and some promise of incremental revenue, 'cause they will run through you, over you, [laughs] whatever- Yeah...
in order to get at that incremental revenue. Particularly, particularly, and this is important, they don't have to do a lot of work to get it.
And, you know, the, the promise of a lot of the way affiliate was done was this is an incremental revenue play, and we're gonna... W- we'll even outsource the actual content, you know, making of the content.
Like w- there's other people who are better at this. Our- Yep... journalists are not gonna be reviewing vacuum cleaners. They would turn in some sort of like, you know, weird inverted pyramid story.
So we're just gonna allow experts. You can see that.
But then it became just you're just hanging your brand on, and this is where, you know, look, Forbes gets a lot of grief, but I think you could make the case that Forbes is just responsive, the most responsive to the market.
You know, you get, you get the Forbes brand on all kinds of different things, and it's not just Forbes, it's lots of different publishers that have done this. And I think coupons are a good example, right?
Like on the one hand, you could look at every newspaper, you know, was carrying coupons as part of their bundle. They didn't make the freaking coupons. Right. They didn't, they didn't go out and source them.
It's a third party. Well, when- So why not do that on the internet? If you, again, if you go back historically enough, right, coupons were in the physical newspaper. Yeah. Right?
And I think that's kinda, you know, that business was incredibly lucrative.
The version of a coupon business that came to digital media was wildly less lucrative, but it was, again, almost sort of the least that Google could do, and that's gone away.
I think there's a, there's a third constituency in the market that we, we haven't yet talked about that I think is very interesting in this space, and probably less known to a lot of folks, and that's the people who are really, really good at some of the paid media arbitrage and some of the schemes.
These are publications like Buyer's Guide, and BrainJolt Media, and Love To Know that most r- listeners here will probably have never heard from, but I guarantee have almost certainly bought a product after clicking on one of their recommendations, either in a search ad or social ad.
Those entities I think will continue to do really well because as the sort of navigating the Google machine gets harder and harder, the.1% of people that are great at it get a larger share of the reward.
Those companies I think will do well. Again, I've talked at length about why I think the WireCutters, and Consumer Reports, and folks that do actually test products and go in-depth will do very well.
Everybody that's in the middle, it's a really arduous path forward, I think, for publishers that might have reviewed some products, relied on freelancers or third parties to review other products, relied obviously on Google for traffic, played around a little bit in buying paid media via Google and Facebook, but never really committed to a lane.
I think that whole sort of middle of, of commerce media is gonna fold and, and the, you know, sort of top echelon of content producers and then the top echelon of growth hackers will, will get much bigger- Yeah...
and, and win a lot more of the market. Well, it sounds like it's like dabbling is gonna be out. Like you can't- Yeah... like dabble as like, you know, one...
It's like, oh, this is our 11th, you know, revenue line that we're, we just keep trying to fill the hole that, you know, advertising has left, and we'll, we'll do, we'll do whatever it takes.
And commerce is hot, so like, yeah, we'll, we'll spin up some affiliate. And, you know, that, that gets harder because that was like an arbitrage play, right? It gets harder.
There may be a couple last quarters of it, specifically in cases where, where media's owned by private equity firms, where an incremental, you know, $10 or $20 million of revenue can make the difference between those firms getting a reward during their hold period or, or having a, a less favorable outcome.
But yeah, the, the middle, you know, 'cause I think the implied point that, that you've made, that a lot of other people in the space have made is like, even if they're super world-class, how many mattress reviews do you actually need to read, right?
Like when does it become just a, a counter valuable paradox of choice for the consumer? You probably need to read one or two.
More and more, I think that traffic will come from, from folks going to a brand directly or, you know, bypassing search in some interface.
But at the same time, quite a bit of that traffic will come from people being targeted by, again, the.1% of the most sophisticated media buyers in the space, who when everybody else gets washed out, can still kinda do their thing in, in whatever world Google and the rest of, of search marketing takes on.Yeah.
But it seems, I mean, Google is sending more traffic directly to brand sites. They're sending more traffic to Reddit in particular. I mean, I think that's obviously well-known, and Quora, and the rest. Yeah.
And there's that, that intermediate layer that publishers have occupied. It became known, I, I believe, or maybe this is just a part of it, as parasite SEO. Can you define for people what exactly is parasite SEO? Yeah.
So parasite SEO, and, and there are folks like, like Lars Lofgren who wrote the sort of viral Forbes posts that are, that are deeper on the technical side of this than I am.
But it's essentially the, the practice of using a well-known domain and partnering or, or, or spinning up third-party content that is produced by an outside party that gets published under that domain to kind of piggyback off the authority that that domain has with Google, right?
Okay. And Forbes is- And so the problem- Forbes is the go-to example for this. Yeah, this is how Forbes ranked CBD gummies.
Again, I don't, like, I have nothing against Forbes or anything, 'cause I, I do believe you can make the case that of all publishers, Forbes has been the most responsive to marketplace changes of any publisher throughout its history.
Yeah. It has been incredibly responsive. And i- in some cases, the results of that responsiveness [laughs] have, have caused some of us to clutch our pearls. But, like, hey- Yeah... this is the internet.
Even the contributor network, as flawed as it was, right?
10 years later, with the kind of, you know, rise of whatever you wanna call it, UGC, citizen journalism, whatever is happening in Elon Musk's world, looks a little bit more prudent than you might have thought it did [chuckles] a few years ago.
Yeah. Now, Forbes is a special case because they've got this relationship with Marketplace, right? Right. Like, I mean, and they, they own, I think, 50% of it. And I think that there's...
When Google tried to disentangle all of this parasite SEO, 'cause to me, like, parasite SEO, it's, it's kind of like made for advertising websites. It's, uh, which is also similar to me, and it's like pornography.
It's like- Yeah... kind of know it when you see it kind of thing. It's really difficult to adjudicate.
Well, yeah, the interesting thing about, I think, parasite SEO when it's done well might actually pass the, the porn test, quote unquote. It's when, you know, it gets really, really egregious, and you start having...
Again, we've harped on this example, but Forbes ranking for erectile dysfunction and CBD gummies, that it all kind of falls apart a little bit.
I'm sure defenders of the model would argue that there's still value being created here if the content is good in a way that doesn't exist with- Yeah. To just-... advertising techniques...
what, what, who is to say who is the, you know, expert on anything? I mean, like, who's...
Like, LSU fan site might be an expert on a high-yield savings account, and, you know, Forbes might be know a lot about CBD gummies. Who, who, who are we to decide? Yeah.
[laughs] That's a tough, that's a tough intellectual road, I think, to go down. [laughs] You start to get to nihilism pretty quick, I think, if you go too, too deep down that path.
But I think, you know, you said something a couple minutes ago that I, I think is very relevant here, and that's Google sending traffic directly to brand websites for some of these queries.
'Cause look, I mean, who knows if the love affair with Reddit will last, right?
Like, Reddit is still, I think in Google's mind, kind of like a cued-up incomer, even though it's almost 20 years old and has been through a ton of ownership.
The stock has, has, has risen a lot, but it's still only, like, a $30 billion market cap company, and they're still kind of a viable partner for, for Google right now.
They're still a quarter of an app 11, as I like to say, is, is Reddit's scale right now.
But if Reddit continues on this trajectory that they're on and starts to become something of a true search destination themselves, I think Google's gonna start to have some, some pretty large questions about the kind of monster that they created.
So who knows where that partnership goes. But Google sending more traffic to brand websites directly, like, that's a change that's going to endure.
I think I said in my newsletter, "Alea iacta est," which is Latin for, "The die has been cast." Yeah. Apologies for the, the- Wow. Oh, wow... pretentiousness.
But that w- that is a much more significant change to me than the sort of sudden love affair with forums, because sending traffic to mediocre brand blogs at the expense of publisher middlemen is a very hard line in the sand that Google is drawing, right?
The only reason they...
What Google is basically doing is they're saying, "We're going to send you to a worst and inherently biased source for a given query, because we think it gets you a little bit closer to the point of purchase or the point of transaction."
That, right, if you think about it, if you- Some friction is okay. Like, I think, like- Oh, right... you know, like, that...
This is the sort of thing, as I always think, like, there's, there's this idea, and particularly in tech, that all friction is bad, and all friction must be removed. And, you know, I can understand...
I think Troy on, on People v. Algorithms said, like, that Google started to see, you know, publisher affiliate content pages as, as an invasive species in, in search that needs to be ripped out root- [chuckles] Right...
roots first.
I mean, if there was one thing that I think would make the entire tech media and commerce ecosystem a better place, it would be somebody in the sort of Silicon Valley zeitgeist agreeing to the, the concept that some friction is okay in tech.
Because I can understand- Yeah... if you're, if you believe that, like, friction is horrible, there's no way these intermediary pages should exist, right? Right.
But the reality is your alternative is to send people directly to, like, the brand site to transact, and I understand why Google would wanna do that. But, like, I don't know if that's a better user experience.
I guess- It's, it's the same sort of twisted ethos that's driving Google's decision-making, that's driving something like Amazon Haul, where you can buy meaningless shit you don't need direct from China in nine days- Yeah...
right, for $20 or less.
It's the same idea that's causing Facebook to suddenly put AI bots and other things on the platform so that you instantly kind of get this dopamine hit without having to actually go through the hard work of creating content that people wanna react to.
It's this [chuckles] idea that it has to be as easy and as friction-free as possible that's, that's breaking media... commerce and tech.
And I think in our world, it sometimes gets too myopically covered that, that Google is some sort of, you know, uniquely evil beast, when they really are just an extension of an ethos that, for better or worse, has kind of won in, in our whole business.
And I think folks like us have to respectfully- Yeah... push back at.
But also, like, it's interesting because, like, you know, people have long complained about Google's monopoly position, again, whether it's de facto or de jure, leave it to the courts.
But we're doing more Latin in this podcast. There you go. But, you know, the reality is, be careful what you wish for, [laughs] I always say. Because Google is under more pressure than it's ever been.
Leave aside its stock price, doesn't seem like it's under too much pressure.
[laughs] But, like, it is under pressure, you know, because of how polluted its, its core search product has, has become, who- who- whosever fault that is, and because of the specter of AI being the first real challenge to the 10 blue links era.
Yep. And, and Google really enjoyed the 10 blue links era.
And I used to, you know, poke and prod at, at Neal Vogel from DotDash Meredith about his, you know, uh, reliance on this algorithm, and he would always tell me, "Well, it's the most reliable algorithm."
[laughs] "That's ever existed." And the reason it was reliable is because you don't mess with some- don't fix what is not broken.
Google never had to give guidance for a reason, 'cause they could tune it wherever they wanted. [laughs] I mean, like, that doesn't... They were coming up short, just put a few more ads on a few meta theme of pages.
Like, it's like, it's fine.
But now that they're under pressure, they have to make a lot of changes, and when you are, when you are that big and you are, you know, the nervous system of an, of an entire massive ecosystem, any change that you make is gonna, like, be an extinction-level event for some people.
And you wonder who really knows how the beast works.
Like, I think one of the things that's been really telling about how Google has brought some of these, quote-unquote, "helpful content updates" and, and core updates to life, is these changes they have made, which to, to your point, have been existential to the ecosystem, have upended entire businesses, it seems like it gets published far and wide to folks like us because we follow a lot of people in the space, but it's buried on, like, a sub-page of Google Search Console, and the author of, of some of these blog posts around helpful content updates is, like, a fairly shockingly junior person, giving the, given the importance of- [laughs]...
some of these changes to the ecosystem. And it, it's, it, it begs a couple questions. One is, does Google not realize the gravitas?
Is the other possibility, like, senior brass, this would be a very, like, Ed Zitron argument, right?
Senior brass at Google just doesn't know how the beast works, they're management consultants or whatever in, in, in tech clothing.
It, it's, it's this, like, little subtle thing, but the fact that you have sort of these mid-level managers writing 300-word blog posts that upend entire multi-hundred million dollar markets and livelihoods is just this really interesting kind of sub-story in, in this whole, in this whole thing, and I think it speaks a lot to, to, to where Google is falling short.
The, the ask, I think, that would be reasonable from the sort of media affiliate, whatever you wanna call a community to Google, is just for more media literacy.
Like, I joked on my blog that, like, Google should just hire Lars, whatever it costs, right? The guy who wrote the Forbes article. Yeah. If it costs them 800 grand to hire Lars, that's all right.
I mean, I have no idea if he would go work there. But that's a rounding error in Google's budget.
And the amount of institutional knowledge that he would bring on this space I think outweighs 100 product managers that Google has working on, on search and, and media right now.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna date myself a little bit, but I mean, Google sort of did this before by, by hiring Danny Sullivan, you know? Yeah. He, uh- Danny was the ambassador- Correct me if I'm wrong...
to that, to that world. That was more of a public editor kind of ombudsman role, right? Or was it more of a- Well, I mean, to me, I mean,
th- first of all Danny Sullivan started Search Engine Watch, which was a really sort of pivotal publication in the rise of, like, search. Nobody was doing it, and, like, Danny did.
I think he was, like, living in England at the time. And [laughs] you know, he became the, the center of this emerging community of, of people who were engaged in SEO at the time, and then it became SEM too. Built...
He was actually a really interesting early example of someone who built, like, I guess what we would call now, like, a creator independent business. I mean, it became part of, of, of what was then...
He was a colleague for a brief time early in my career. Oh, nice.
But then he got hired by Google 'cause he had this central role in the ecosystem and everyone knew Danny, and he was the way for the Borg to communicate, because, like, Google was hiding...
I wouldn't hiding, but they, they were hiding behind this algorithm as if they're like, "Well, we're just kind of like, you know, we don't know exactly what happens.
The algorithm's making all the decisions and, like, you know, we can't really..." And it was always kind of, like, ridiculous, because I'm like, "You built this thing. What are you talking about?"
[laughs] Like, you're not Frankenstein. But, like, you know, now I think what's interesting is, you know, when you talk about the helpful content updates, th- they're doing manual actions. Right.
It's they- they've almost dropped the illusion that the algorithm- Yeah... can figure this out. And in a way that's refreshing, right? There's, like, a little bit of honesty here, which is- Yeah, co- finally. Right.
You know, the, the curtain is back, yes. Th- there's a guy- The curtain's back... it's a little disappointing with the guy, but like it's a, it's a real product manager.
[laughs] The wizard's back there with the projector.
And to me that's, like, that's a defensible position that Google could have if they actually had some, I mean, forget about affiliate and commerce, just some semblance of, of media literacy to begin with.
And it's, you know...
I mean, I think Danny's role is interesting, but it's almost like you want folks like him closer to product and engineering, where if manual actions are gonna be taken, you know, this would be super, super manual, arduous work where people from deep within the ecosystem would basically have to look at some of the, the companies that have large share of voice on the SERP-And using their sort of institutional knowledge actually say, "This is a company that truly reviews products.
This is a company that is getting quality traffic. This is a company that converts at a high rate. When people click on their, on their links, they're likely to buy."
Like, there are people in our world that know these things.
I think I know enough to be dangerous, and there are people that know the specifics of this 50 to 100 times that I do, and, and Google seems to wanna kind of keep these people at arm's length with a 39 and a half foot pole.
That's, I think, where the, the criticism is, is probably the most valid, which is you're taking manual actions, and you have people that don't even understand the 101 level of this ecosystem on the keys of those manual actions.
And look, I mean, maybe I'm wrong with all of this, but, but if so, Google needs better comms people to write some of these helpful update blog posts because it, it, it's coming across that people that have very surface level understanding of, of commerce and affiliate SERPs are [chuckles] wielding an inordinate amount of power right now on, on who gets traffic and, and the results aren't great.
So I like...
In the newsletter, I'm, I'm somewhat of a defender of Google's broader ethos and the way that they're actually trying to react to competition far more than most people in the space, but I'm a very, you know, sort of harsh critic of some of the tactical execution.
Yeah.
Well, it's hard because you have to look at it from a long-term perspective because, again, anything that-- any action that Google is going to take in this regard is going to have a bunch of people who are losers, and they're gonna be very vocal about it, and it is going to be, to some degree, ham-handed.
Yeah. Like, it's kind of like how, you know, any time a big company does layoffs, there's immediately like, "Oh, they handled it terribly."
And I'm like, okay, but literally every single big company that has done layoffs has been like [chuckles] has done it terribly, so I almost think, like, this is just how I expect it to be done terribly.
Doesn't make it any better. But long term, you know, it's, it's hard to say because, one, I think clearly, no matter whose fault it was, the search results have become less useful. Like, I think it doesn't...
You don't have to be an expert, you just have to have two eyes to understand that search is less useful than it is.
Secondly, like, you wanna get to the point where- whereas Google's interests are aligned, it-- they don't want people going to Perplexity. They don't wanna p- people going to SearchGPT.
They don't-- They want people to be finding value still in the search results. Absolutely. Yeah. Are they gonna direct more traffic to their own property? Yeah, of course, man. Like- Right.
[chuckles] And a- again, it's another one of these things, right? Like, there aren't too many regular internet users taking to the s- to the streets to, you know- [chuckles]... defend large commerce publishers.
I've seen no- There's a lot of well-intentioned- No local protests here. [chuckles] Right?
There-- And like, if, you know, maybe if you really think about this deeply, there probably are some people that are upset by some of the very, very good niche communities that have been hurt and some of the very good niche commerce publishers.
I think there'd be a good set- Yeah... of people that are, you know, that would be upset if, if, you know, Wirecutter got significantly de-listed. I don't know. Yeah. The air purifier site. I don't know.
I mean, I like, I, I appreciate it, but I'm not- But yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, one thing that is important to remember about Google or any platform is, like, a lot of enshitification is a demand side problem.
Like, we treat it like it's all supply side, right? Greedy monopolies, capitalists, robber barons make changes to platforms to make them worse to, to make more money.
But the reality is execs at these companies see all sorts of data points about people's true preferences, not their stated preferences, right?
They see what people actually do with their little keyboard fingers and, and, and mice, and they know what users to some degree actually want.
And unfortunately, I think in, in, in many ways it is, it is shittier user experiences.
So unless companies are willing to be bold enough to cut against the grain, I think a fair amount of, of what is hurting commerce media and stuff right now is, you know, when given the opportunity to get information quicker, you know, users are gravitating towards that, and, and to some degree, Google is reacting to that, right?
This, this line of thinking extended too far gets dangerous, right? You just get faster horses and no cars.
But it is, I, I think, a valid part of the conversation that gets lost sometimes, which is, [chuckles] you know, people don't necessarily wanna wade through, you know, a ton of middlemen, but how do you sort of balance that with the fact that a lot of, you know, companies that do review products and services add value?
It's, it's a hard problem. Yeah. And it's also, it's a subsidy, right? I mean, just like the classifieds subsidize the, quote-unquote, "hard news"- Yeah...
the new food section subsidize, it's not like the Baghdad Bureau, like, paid for itself. Yeah. You know, this is...
And a lot of, and I think this is the hard part 'cause I think one of the big losers are, you know, news publishers that use this as a subsidy for less profitable core business lines, right? Yes.
I mean, there's the meme that The New York Times is now, like, a games company 'cause people are spending more time on games and food and less on- It's a lifestyle bundle for yuppies, Brian, is my tagline. Yeah.
It's for the Upper West Side as a mindset. Yeah. [chuckles] I get that. And like, you know, but that is like, it's a little bit of, you know, what's, what's new is-- what's old is new again, et cetera.
I think one of the hard parts is, like, when we talk about parasite SEO is, you know, yeah, nobody needs the, like, 9,000th, like, mattress review site under, you know, some old magazine brand.
But there are a lot of, you know, people who are, you know, trying to support a, a part of the business that I think is societally important that because of keyword blocking and a lot of just, you know, the way the ad system has gone is, is almost not an economically viable business on its own.
Yeah. And there's a big question of, like-Let's say that we're sort of both right and this sort of like middle of the sort of commerce media ecosystem is going to get hollowed out.
There's a question of, does Google have some moral responsibility to protect that ecosystem which it created through the incentives that it, it offered over the last, call it 10 to 15 years, right?
Like, even if I'm correct and Wirecutter consumer reports will do great, some sort of smaller niche media companies will get bought by retailers and brands directly as a sort of content marketing and media play, and growth hackers will do very well.
You still have these massive, you know, relatively speaking, commerce media operations at Hearst, Dotdash, Meredith, Condé Nast, Red Ventures, as well as all the indie publications that employ a lot of people, employ a lot of freelancers.
And yeah, to your point, do act as a subsidy for, you know, harder journalism that is rarely, if ever, gonna be profitable. Mm. Does Google have a responsibility to protect that, right?
Should publishers be just that ever little bit higher in the ranking order?
Because if a certain amount of quality journalism sort of disappears, as so does, you know, search and, and information on a long enough timeline. That's a question that I hope people kind of grapple with a little bit.
Yeah. That even if some of these commerce media operations don't always add the most kind of immediate value, if they subsidize lower margin media products, should there be some move to protect them?
I think it's a really, really interesting question, and I think over the last 10 years, there was a little bit of an implied agreement to what we've been talking about for 40 minutes from Google that- Yeah...
yeah, that that balance should exist, but only when Google was such an unchallenged monopoly that it was convenient.
At the first sign of kind of difficulty, they've, they've seemingly run from that position, which has negative externalities. Yeah.
I mean, look, it-- to me it reminds me of like, you know, marketers with their agencies, right?
I mean, they, they crunch down [chuckles] their margins like zero, and like, yeah, of course they're gonna turn a blind eye to them, like, having some form of kickbacks that they'll disguise as not being kickbacks- Right...
'cause, like, everyone's gotta eat. Like, I mean, like, I think that's why I'm like, "Oh no, you know, marketers are getting ripped off by media agencies being principals and trans--" like, give me a break.
You're not paying them for their services, so they're gonna make money somehow. So you, you get what you, you, you deserve. I wanna talk really quickly before you go about AppLovin, because it's, like, an interesting...
I've always found, you know, this-- there's so many different pockets of, like, digital media, and the app download people have, ha- have always been, like, almost, like, separate.
There w- there's been, like, the, the app ad tech [chuckles] ecosystem, and then there's been the ad tech ad tech ecosystem. One is west, one is east, Bloods, Crips, I don't know. But, like- [laughs]...
App- AppLovin is, like, a company that, uh, uh, for people who are not in the gaming space, like, uh, you know, it was probably not central. You know, they're not...
They would think about TradeDesk, they wouldn't think about AppLovin. But AppLovin is, is, is, has become either, like, a fascinating example of a bubble or, or this is, like, an incredibly interesting company. Yeah.
So- What's the download on AppLovin? For those that are less familiar, like, just to sort of throw out some stats on AppLovin's run, the stock is something like, something like 10X over the last- Yeah... year and change.
It is more than twice the size of The TradeDesk by market cap, it's bigger than Pinterest, Snap, and Reddit combined, and it's more than three times the market cap of this combined IPG Omnicom sort of mega agency.
And they drive downloads of games. And they drive downloads of games. It is in a sort of... I mean, this is, this is pretty crass, and Kathy at AppLovin, if you're listening, don't, don't hate me for this, right?
But it's basically the 15-second video spot that you, that kind of hijacks your screen when you try to level up in Candy Crush. I doubt they market it that way, Mike. Mostly historically it's been...
It's, it's been a successful business. Three billion dollars plus in revenue in twenty-twenty-three.
But what's driving a lot of the surge in their stock price here in twenty-twenty-four is they've started selling their advertising services to high-growth D2C and other e-commerce brands, and the initial sort of ROAS has been pretty good.
There's some early signs that it's sort of an incremental channel for advertisers.
But I think the operative question that probably a lot of people that don't come from the space have is like, "Okay, how is that driving a hundred and twenty billion dollar company?" And here's my perspective on it.
So for, for, you know, my background is actually, my day job is on the demand side. I, I run growth for a conglomerate of CPG brands, so I both directly and indirectly manage quite a bit of advertising spend.
And one of the things about sort of the D2C CPG e-commerce industry is it's wildly uncomfortable how much the vibes of our space are tied to meta's algorithm performance, right? Mm.
You talk about, like, aggregate spend of D2C brands over Q4 of last year, it was like seventy percent on meta, and a fair amount on Amazon PPC too.
So when Facebook's algorithm or, or, or meta's algorithm is working well, the vibes in like D2C LinkedIn and advertiser Twitter are fantastic.
When there's an election, when there are weird bugs in the machine, as they start to pivot to the- towards their AI future, it feels like a mortuary in our business.
AppLovin is the first glimmer of hope, I would say, in seven to 10 years, that there might be a net new incremental channel that pops up, right? It's the... It, it potentially dwarfs the scale.
I mean, for most, like, fast growth D2C brands, Re- Reddit is still a rounding error. Twitter CPMs are low, but they're not really performing. Connected TV is becoming a thing.
Retail media is viable, but only for omni-channel brands that are in a lot of retailers.
You know, for a lot of, you know, sort of up and coming e-commerce brands, you live and die by Facebook, and if it breaks, everything else is, again, almost a rounding error.
AppLovin, if they continue to build at this rate, potentially is a true sort of second fiddle player, and I think the sheer sort of optimism of that narrative has, you know, driven the stock to almost unfathomable highs.
It's almost valued as much as Shopify is. This will be the year we find out if, if the company can actually deliver on that promise.But like that's the sort of like- But they're an ad network basically for mobile games.
They are an ad network for mobile games. But- They don't own any inventory.
They don't-- And so they're-- I mean, for ad networks, you either need like a unique sort-- you either need like unique inventory, you need performant like ad units, like you special ad unit, some kind of like special data that can...
Like what exactly is its, it-- what exactly is substantial? Well, I think the-- I think s-so there, there's a few arguments that folks would make here.
Here's the one that I'll make is what I think AppLovin has that, that doesn't really exist are access to consumers that have opted out of a lot of the rest of the digital world.
Even the most tinfoil hat folks on the planet I think are playing Words With Friends and Candy Crush, and this is kind of a, a crass way and, and cynical way of saying it, but there aren't too many consumers, particularly older consumers, particularly some older higher household income consumers that aren't playing some amount of mobile games.
And this is an audience that in theory, and we'll see if this, this plays out in practice, is, is pretty hard to reach elsewhere.
What will determine AppLovin's success over the next sort of year is whether or not the, the customers are truly incremental and truly discovering these brands for the first time when they get the ads on mobile games, or if they've seen ads for these companies on Facebook, out on billboards, et cetera, et cetera, and then are just sort of purchasing at the eleventh hour when they play a mobile game.
That'll take twelve to eighteen months, I think, for that data to sort of come out into the world.
But even if, you know, they don't have, quote unquote, "unique inventory," I think a lot of the optimism is being driven by this hypothesis and theory that they do have access to a very unique customer that is very, very hard to reach through both traditional and digital channels.
And if that's true, it could justify this sort of meteoric- Yes... valuation. And that is, that's the incrementality- Right... that, that, that everyone looks for. Right.
And that just means like you're getting something additional- Yeah... because a lot of [chuckles] the ecosystem is about trying to take credit for a transaction at the end of it. Yeah.
And- And AppLovin is too, like everybody else in the space, are very, very aggressively trying to do that. Yeah.
No, everyone is, because if it-- that's, that's what- If they're collecting some data that suggests that they might be, you know, helping companies actually tap into new audiences in a way that hasn't been seen in any advertising, in any nascent advertising channel since I've been in the business.
And what I think is good is, like I said, it'll be sometime by Q2, Q3 of this year, there'll be enough data to know if, if this hypothesis actually plays out or if this is gonna be a, a pretty large bubble. Right.
And, and final thing is around, around the, uh, the AI answer engines. Yeah. Right? How do you see there that changing, you know, the, the, the world of, of commerce media?
Because there's gonna be-- it would seem to be very clear with the AI overviews that the, the amount of traffic going out is going to be less, and that's another sort of pressure point.
Doesn't mean no traffic's gonna go to zero, right? Yeah. But I would imagine there's going to be less traffic as people use...
I don't know about you, but like, I mean, the more I use like Perplexity, the less I use Google. I mean, there's only so much searching. Perplexity, Perplexity Shopping is a great product.
Like, uh, it's, it's a [chuckles]
it's kind of an interesting controlled environment, some of the things they're doing on the back end to make it possible for you to sort of one-click purchase from merchants like Best Buy- Yeah...
and stuff on Perplexity are unclear, you know, how sustainable some of that will be. But as a sheer sort of like commerce experience, it kind of feels right.
Like I, I was fairly bearish on a lot of the LLM commerce deployments until I saw Perplexity because, you know, Voice has been tried, has failed.
Chatbots in some form have existed, you know, for quite some time, have never sort of gained critical mass.
Like this idea that commerce was gonna become sort of a more conversational transaction, I was, I was skeptical of.
I, it was one of these things where I'm like, people have voted with their feet and they want rectangle search bars and square product pages that they can buy from, and we should optimize the margin, basically.
But seeing Perplexity shopping experience, seeing how aggressively Amazon has been willing to adopt Rufus, obviously they hired our friend Shireen there too, which is kind of- Yeah...
kind of a fun little- Shireen Kantock... kind of a fun little wrinkle in, in that process.
But, you know, if you think about Amazon adopting something like Rufus, they're giving up a lot of ad inventory to do that, right?
Because a conventional commerce search can show four or five ads that they can charge advertisers on an auction for, and then product pages. Rufus might be able to show you one if it, he, she is lucky.
So this is gonna be the year, again, whether it's these large companies, be it Google, Perplexity, Amazon, have sort of done their homework and they realize that the LTV of, of showing shoppers these kind of LLM-driven experiences is better, or whether they're just trying to kind of brute force it into being because the narrative is so AI friendly.
Like we'll know, I think, by the end of 2025 if LLMs will become a somewhat dominant infrastructure for commerce or not, which is why like there's so much speculation in the space right now, but I'm kinda like, we'll have the data in six to twelve months.
Yeah. We can wait. [chuckles] Um, like this is not gonna be a long burn.
Like y- the thing to watch, like Perplexity's gonna be hard 'cause they're such a nascent product and, you know, they still have such a, a fraction of market share relative to Google.
But the thing that I think will actually determine Perplexity and a lot of people's fate is I would s- watch what Amazon does with their LLM experience.
If it continues to get deployed to a larger percent of traffic, continues to become more prominent in your Amazon app and home screen, it means they're seeing things that suggest that AI is more lucrative for them than conventional search.
If you see Amazon start to roll back Rufus in a big way, that is- Yeah... really bearish, I think, for the, for the entire- I'm gonna hold my fire on that.
And I can re-- I, I got excited for a9 back in the day when, when Amazon was, was built, was gonna build its own search engine, and I got, I got burned on that. Yeah.
And that was not a-- that was a big operation within Amazon and, you know, and- Yeah.
I mean, they, they put a lot against that and, and it didn't, you know, forget about the Fire Phone on the- But my, my fear with it all right now is like, I, I think a lot of these, something like Perplexity, and, and I'm thinking about this from a commerce lens 'cause that's the business- Yeah...
I work in, but I think it might be the same for search.
I think it might be this kind of experience that someone like me says they like better, but they actually buy less stuff when they go to it, which is not what large tech companies are gonna roll. Yeah.
If, if my average revenue per visitor or my, especially my lifetime value is lower, it's gonna be really, really hard. And Rufus gets taken out back. [chuckles] Exactly.
So my thought is I might prefer Perplexity commerce, but I probably buy more shit when I do a conventional product search on Google, and that's gonna be a really interesting sort of dichotomy.
If, if my hypothesis is correct that that plays out at scale, that'll lead to some really interesting- Yes... sort of developments in the space. All right, Mike.
We'll leave it on the, the buy more shit like litmus test, which is always the litmus test. [chuckles] All right. Thank you so much. This was really fun. I really appreciate you doing it. Yeah, I had a good time.
Keep reading, I'll keep reading. Keep working- Absolutely... on my stuff, and I'll do the same. Thank you. [outro music]