Google handcufs – depending on Google makes your business vulnerable

The internet is a well regulated industry. Google is its regulator. Like Marie Antoinette handing out cake to the peasants, every month Google allots the various web-sites in its index a certain amount of traffic. Certain sites do better than others (Wikipedia, About.com), but for the most part each site takes its monthly Google traffic home and tries to do the best it can with it.

As is the case with any monthly budget, there’s only so much you can do with it though. Unless the budget itself increases, there’s only so much stretching to be done. And there’s only three ways to increase your traffic budget: (1) get more from Google (SEM!), (2) better convert your Google traffic to traffic of your own (and I’ve said my piece there already) or (3) go find a new source of traffic.

Unless you’re in the inner circle (again, Wikipedia, About.com), you can never grow to any significant size site inside the Google regulated industry. The regulator won’t let you. Why would they? If they actually make you a big, important site than the balance of power actually starts to tip in your favor. No regulator likes that. Regulators make the rules, not the regulated.

Not so coincidentally, if you actually look at the recent successful sites over the past few years – YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. – none of them got there by Google traffic. They created a product and figured out a way to get mass appeal outside the Google regulatory system. To make a bad analogy, if you were a global leader intent on world domination, would you make a plan to achieve this goal by working with the United Nations? No, you would go out and take what you thought was yours. That’s what these big sites did. They flipped the virtual bird to Google and took what was theirs.

full essay@marksonland.com