At AppStoreHQ, Chris has taught me a lot about the virtuous cycle we think will drive our business: Content <-> Distribution <-> Monetization. Focus on one of those three and you’ll help drive the other two.
Before we started, my idea of distribution was much simpler: build the content and let them come. Turns out, that doesn’t work. Distribution is hard work and is very much muli-faceted. We do things like paid-search, white label syndication, Twitter integration, SEO, widgets and badges, etc. Right now, Google dominates the market, but I think this will change drastically over the next few years.
On an average day, over three-quarters of our traffic is differen by Google organics and the rest split somewhat evenly between AdWords (paid-search), other search engines (Yahoo/Bing), other links (typically high-traffic news sites/blogs), and social media sites (Twitter/Facebook). My guess is this breakdown is typical for most content-based web businesses, especially new ones.
As you can see, Google has a lockdown on web-based distribution. But, that’s going away. Here’s a great talk by Fred Wilson on how Twitter will make money (hint: traffic often equates to revenue, people will pay for traffic, and Twitter is driving traffic):
Let’s assume this social media thing works out and drives significant traffic. And, let’s also pretend that with some growth — and the new Yahoo deal — that Bing’s market share grows as well. What happens if your site’s traffic sources looked more like:
- 40% from Google organics.
- 5% from Google AdWords.
- 30% from Twitter/Facebook/social media.
- 20% from other search engines (Yahoo/Bing).
- 5% from other links.
With 60% of the traffic, search would obviously still be extremely important, but less so. For many web publishers the focus will shift from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for users. As a result, both users and search engines will have a better experience, and both will deal with less spam. It will be extremely hard to trick thousands or millions of users to pass your links to their friends if they aren’t providing some value.
