I recently came across an article that was bemoaning the fact that the travel blogging space has become overrun with low level search intended writing, and the actual feet on the ground, first hand, personal travel experiences are disappearing from the web. IMHO this author has confused love and money, a common complaint in the web publishing world.
The question you need to ask yourself is whether you are in the game for love or money … cause you can’t have both …
Let’s take a look at another issue. Recently the Food 52 had an article about how Google’s new recipe algorithm was biased towards large sites that had IT staff who could republish their entire site with recipe meta data so Google could understand it. The writer also made the argument that larger sites with the budgets to do calorie computations would receive an unfair advantage.
…I do know the economics of advertising and production will choose the winner …
But back to the recipe argument. Iis there some truth to her assertion? Yes. For example, Aaron Chronister, creator of the Bacon Explosion, showed me how he doesn’t rank for a recipe he created.
In this case Google got it wrong, and they are partially to blame because they changed the rules in the middle of the game without realizing that not everyone will be able to update to the new format so quickly. Some people are in the game because they love to cook and, for them, it’s not about the money.
We are at a disruptive time in the publishing world. The barriers to publish are so low they are non existent (see Cognitive Surplus Review by Clay Shirky). Google’s adsense allows anyone to monetize a website via adsense without needing a sales or accounting team. Large publishers have scaled creation costs so low that content is a commodity just to wrap advertising around . The New York Times is trying to find a balance between setting information free and charging for access and failing miserably at it. I can’t tell you where we are going to end up, but I do know the economics of advertising and production will choose the winner. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you are in the game for love or money … cause you can’t have both.