Zero Clicks #2: Google's lack of media literacy

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

One thing that has always astounded me about Google is the company’s abject lack of media literacy, particularly when it comes to the commerce media ecosystem.

By now, the story of the core update is clear. In trying to combat slop, Google wholly failed to distinguish between affiliate websites that do unbiased, in-depth reviews of products and services and those that are giant SEO arbitrage schemes. Google crushed them all, providing a boon to direct content efforts on eCommerce websites that looks set to endure.

The bizarre nuance behind all this is that Google still really likes the form factor of listicles, comparison articles and other types of product reviews and recommendations, it just suddenly doesn’t care for the affiliate links and other monetization efforts required to sustain those businesses. This is a fundamentally incoherent position but one that savvy brand-side marketers have a fiduciary responsibility to exploit. 

The best time for a brand CMO to reallocate more efforts from paid to SEO content was six months ago; the next best time is now.  Collections pages with helpful FAQs about a product or service, well-written long form blog posts from brands and even listicles that promote a brand’s own products alongside complimentary offerings ala L’Oreal’s skincare.com are all good investments. For enterprises, tastefully building programmatic category pages and microsites trained on your own reviews, catalog and customer query data now merits significant consideration.

Google’s move to disintermediate publishers from product searches is wrapped up in a broader ethos of wanting to remove any perceived “friction” from user search. In that lens, it stands to reason that Google will continue to reward entities that produce high quality content directly alongside selling a product or service. An affiliate link out is one extra click and clicks are the current enemy. Brands effectively cosplaying as media companies cuts out the middleman.

This is all a tough pill to swallow for the media ecosystem. But in Google’s defense, publishers have no inherent right to win traffic just for the sheer virtue of being publishers. As Brain Morrissey quipped back in May:

“Publishers are not entitled to traffic to their vacuum review pages ginned up by an SEO chop shop. Google is hardly without its sins, but it is focusing on consumers in overhauling search to clear out the direct-marketing detritus”

Furthermore, there’s no inherent reason brands can’t produce high quality commerce and service journalism, particularly companies in passion driven niches who know their space better than anyones. As far as helpful content goes, even an inherently biased blog from a brand is better than a ten-year old Quora thread with two responses living on page one of Google.

But at the end of the day, when content is created in the service of selling another product or service, rather than being the product in and of itself, it is marketing. And, for better or worse, Google is perfectly happy to have more marketing in the SERP. 

Sr. Director of Growth Marketing / Director of Ad Sales, Mozilla

Very quietly, the nonprofit behind Firefox is on a major hiring binge to essentially build a privacy-first advertising ecosystem, battling the walled gardens of big tech. The two jobs I’ve highlighted above pay north of $300K on-target earnings, showing that Mozilla can pay near top of market, even with its 501c3 classification.

However, there’s a delicious bit of irony here– Mozilla makes >85% of its revenue from a $500m+ deal for Google to be the default search engine in Firefox. If United States vs. Google continues to play out on its current trajectory, the deal that keeps Mozilla alive may be kaput. Thus, Mozilla’s efforts to build ad products to rival Google largely depends on Google getting to continue its monopolistic stranglehold on search that keeps Mozilla alive.

Senior Enterprise AE, Retail, Shopify

Safe to say Shopify is fully back from its post COVID doldrums- the stock popped 20% last week as the company continues to convince the world’s largest omnichannel brands to join conventional DTC sellers on the platform. Now the company is staffing up in a big way with its sights set on further expansion in enterprise retail.

The competitive landscape in enterprise commerce platforms is pretty underwhelming– most enterprises are either on legacy solutions from SAP or Salesforce or plodding along with hacky custom builds or lost dreams to roll out headless architecture. Shopfiy is going to win FORTUNE 500 accounts in a big way and the sales reps that make it happen are going to get paid.