SparkToro Blog

OP here. I dropped an X/Twittter account in the end of 2022 with ~17k followers and… really, nothing changed. Since then, it’s safe to assume that things worsened there and everywhere. Google is the only traffic referrer that still matters. See: https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-how-much-n…

Great discussion of startups and vc funding: https://sparktoro.com/blog/the-chill-work-manifesto/ HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497729

https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twitter-analys… Their methodology is very detailed. Maybe Twitter can post theirs to give more confidence in their 5%. They used multiple datasets and posted the calculated mDAU for each.

For context, an analysis estimated 70% of Elon Musk's followers are fake [0]. It suggests the following reasons: > Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others > Accounts that receive great deals of press coverage and public interest (like ex-President Trump and Mr. Musk) tend to attract more fake/spam followers than others > Accounts that Twitter recommends to new users (which often includes @ElonMusk) tend to get more fake/spam followers No doubt this is also true for Biden. Seems to me that Musk et al should be less concerned about overall percentage of fake accounts than of these big numbers encountered on population accounts. [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twitter-analys…

The best supporting data is the rise in no-click searches. See https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended… No-click searches continue to grow in share while google continues to adopt design that presents information outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the fact you were looking for presented at the top in large text outside the scope of a link. This suggests a growing share of searches weren’t looking for links in the first place, they were looking for information and when the search engine provided that information, the user left without clicking a link

Check out this post by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame on the topic, where he advocates for hiring consultancies https://sparktoro.com/blog/why-you-should-hire-agencies-consultants-fo… To be fair, I think your point about "except for very boutique consultancies" may apply to his recommendation. I can't imagine him advocating for an Accenture or similar, instead the message is bring on expertise for specific initiatives as needed.

The discovery part might be interesting to compare to something like SparkToro [0]. [0] https://sparktoro.com/

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters. https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-ch… That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribution-is-not… That is also a must read. The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for. Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget. There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.

I think what people mean by everyone varies a lot, which is why I wanted to draw attention to more specific numbers. For example, in the Datos data cited[1], on desktop 86% were using traditional search engines >10 visits/month vs. only 21% for AI chat tools. That is indeed a very significant percentage, but more than 4x less than search and (at least I) wouldn't say that ~1/5 is "everyone." [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-ai-tools-1…

> Look where everyone is looking In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead." [0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-20-in-2024-…

The result is minor AND Google spent a (relative) lot of money to achieve it (especially in the eyes of the new CFO). Jeff Dean is desperately trying to save the prestige of the research (in a very insular, Google-y way) because he wants to save the 2017-era economically-not-viable blue sky culture where Tensorflow & the TPU flourished and the transformer was born. But the reality is that Google’s core businesses are under attack (anti-trust, Jedi Blue etc), the TPU now has zero chance versus NVidia, and Google is literally no longer growing ads. His financing is about to pop in the next 1-2 years. https://sparktoro.com/blog/is-google-losing-search-market-share/

The black box leaked recently. https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-lea…

The Rand Fishkin article that this refers to is a much better source https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-lea…

> We see practically no correlation between these worlds. Helen will say "We're trending on platform X" and I look and see nothing in the web stats. Maybe 2 out of 2000 hits cross over from Facebook or Twitter. Conversely, we can get on the front page of a big website, but have no activity on social media. Social platforms that send referral traffic often strip the referrer information, so your visitors will show up as 'direct'. [0] [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-dark-social-falsely-attributes…

Right. And his new, non-venture capital model for raising money for his next company seemed to work pretty well: https://sparktoro.com/blog/raised-a-very-unusual-round-of-funding-were…

There's evidence the entire online ad industry is a scam and that Facebook and Google are aware [1] [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/what-if-performance-advertising-is-just-an-…

Fewer than 50% of Google searches result in a click these days. Largely thanks to the helpful (to the user) excerpts they provide ... and (I think) the trashy SEO-focused barely readable writing that you often find upon clicking through. https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-resul…

They have over 90% of the search market globally[1]. 1. https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-google-kicks-…

Because you increasingly don't leave Google: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2020/01/09/th… https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-resul… When users stay on the Google and Facebook platforms then news media companies are for practical purposes forced to have a presence on both, but that also means Google and Facebook will capture most of the advertising revenue and the news media companies producing the actual content will see less. Hence the regulation. Google has already done deals with various news media companies in Australia. Facebook is in the process of doing the same. The Australian government got what they wanted.

> How can you say that with a straight face? I didn't. > They're both 10x engineers. https://medium.com/@yuval.idan5/the-10x-engineer-myth-is-wrong-but-its… https://sparktoro.com/blog/belief-in-the-mythical-10x-hire-hurts-your-…

I think Rand Fishkin has some good thoughts[1] regarding the broader implications of companies like Hitwise failing. Regardless of data collection methods (which is a totally valid discussion), losing visibility into the areas of internet behavior dominated by the big players will carry a cost. 1: https://sparktoro.com/blog/avasts-shutdown-of-jumpshot-will-harm-the-w…

> They bring real visitors and customers. if this is to be believed [0] less then 50% of google searches result in a click though to the site, so one could argue that because of things like snippets in search results Google don't always drive traffic to your site. [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-resul…

Fundamentally, Google's initiative on differential privacy is motivated by a desire to not lose data-based ad targeting while trying to hinder the real solution: Blocking data collection entirely and letting their business fail. In a world where Google is now hurting content creators and site owners more than it is helping them[1], I see no reason to help Google via differential privacy when outright blocking tracking data is a viable solution. [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-resul…

According to a recent study of Google US web searches in 2019 Q1: Received 150+ Billion searches Solved 48.96% of those searches without a click Sent 6.01% of all searches (~12% of search clicks) to websites owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company Directed a click to non-Alphabet-owned websites (aka, the rest of the web) after 45.03% queries https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-much-of-googles-search-traffic-is-left-…

The author of these tweets is also the author of the report, and he claims that he did provide a methodology [0]. The report can be found here: https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-much-of-googles-search-traffic-is-left-… . [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/randfish/status/1159175385906438144

Google has a monopoly on search. Their market share is 94%. https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-google-kicks-… As a monopolist, they need to meet much higher standards of accountability, transparency, and fairness. Would we tolerate it if the electric monopoly cut off power to the Daily Mail? Or the water monopoly? When you're not a monopoly, you don't have to care about any of these things. You're in it to win it. As a society, we cannot have a monopoly willy nilly censoring sites with no accountability or means of redress. It is an intolerable situation. A monopoly must be demonstrably fair to everyone.

> We're a nonsensical investment for a standard VC, sure. Maybe there's a venture investment philosophy for non-unicorns. [0] [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/raised-a-very-unusual-round-of-funding-were…

You can read about some of that in previous posts on Rand's own blog over the years. There's "My Complicated Relationship With No Longer Being CEO" from late 2015, written 2 years after he stepped down as CEO, where he admits regretting stepping down and his "displeasure and frustration" with ways the new CEO was running things: https://sparktoro.com/blog/my-complicated-relationship-with-no-longer-… Somewhat complicating things, he originally published that post on the company's own website, as evidenced by this link: https://moz.com/rand/my-complicated-relationship-with-no-longer-being-… [I do hope Rand will be happier in his new startup - it feels like he has been heading in a different direction to his former company for a while, at least from reading his blog.]

It doesn't matter, it's still an ad. Adwords aren't the only form of ads. See the reviews and purchase links in the screenshot? That's how Google is going to profit from this. Adwords is only a small part of the modern day Google's monetization efforts. Today, they're doing everything they can to prevent users navigating away from Google property[1]. They plagiarize content from other websites and put it above search results. By 2020, less than 2/3 of Google searches ended in a click to traditional search results [2]. Why would they do that? So that they can show you more ads, of course. This is yet another attempt to direct users away from the websites they were browsing to Google's ad platform. It's particularly egregious because it's disguised as the website's own doing. [1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-result… [2]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended…

Last month, there was a significant buzz among those involved with Google Search (which includes almost the entire modern internet and all its developers). "Erfan Azimi," the owner of an SEO firm, suddenly began sharing leaked documents revealing how Google's ranking system works. It's more complicated than just the search itself; it involves various APIs around it. Nonetheless, these APIs reveal a lot. The leak happened when a Google developer wrote a program to convert API calls into his preferred programming language but accidentally published everything (if you're interested, I've included a link to the commit with all these descriptions [1]). Multiple confirmations from reputable sources, including former and current Googlers, have verified the authenticity of this leak. It's not a hoax or a joke but a genuine breach of information that has piqued the interest of all SEO researchers. Here's a reliable summary of the findings: – Google has allowlists of manually optimized sites, at least for certain topics, such as the 2020 elections or COVID-19. – Domain names and subdomains are significant factors (despite Google's previous claims). – There's a sandbox for new sites, which Google has always denied. – Google directly uses data from EWOK (a system where paid users rate the quality of search results). – User behavior on sites is actively used for ranking. – Click data is collected not only from Google Analytics but also directly from the Chrome browser. – Sites…