When markets are new they are unproven, thus they often have limited investment targeting them.

That in turn means it can be easy to win in new markets just by virtue of existing.

It wouldn't be hard to rank well creating a blog today about the evolution of the 3D printing industry, or a how to site focused on Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices.

Couple a bit of passion with significant effort & limited competition and winning is quite easy.

Likewise in a small niche geographic market one can easily win with a generic, because the location acts as a market filter which limits competition.

But as markets age and become more proven, capital rushes in, which pushes out most of the generic unbranded players.

Back in 2011 I wrote about how Google had effectively killed the concept of category killer domains through the combination of ad displacement, vertical search & the algorithmic ranking shift moving away from relevancy toward awareness. 2 months before I wrote that post Walgreen Co. acquired Drugstore.com for about $429 million. At the time Drugstore.com was one of the top 10 biggest ecommerce pure plays.

Thursday Walgreens Boots announced it would shut down Drugstore.com & Beauty.com:

The company is still trying to fine tune its e-commerce strategy but clearly wants to focus more of its resources on one main site. “They want to make sure they can invest more of the equity in Walgreens.com,” said Brian Owens, a director at the consultancy Kantar Retail. “Drugstore.com and Beauty.com are distractions.”

Big brands can sometimes get coverage of "meh" content by virtue of being associated with a big brand, but when they buy out pure-play secondary e-commerce sites those often fail to gain traction and get shuttered:

Other retailers have picked up pure-play e-commerce sites, only to shut them down shortly thereafter. Target Corp. last year shuttered ChefsCatalog.com and Cooking.com, less than three years after buying them.

The lack of publishing savvy among most large retailers mean there will be a water cycle of opportunity which keeps re-appearing, however as the web gets more saturated many of these opportunities are going to become increasingly niche options riding new market trends.

If you invest in zero-sum markets there needs to be some point of differentiation to drive switching. There might be opportunity for a cooking.com or a drugstore.com targeting emerging and frontier markets where brands are under-represented online (much like launching Drugstore.com in the US back in 1999), but it is unlikely pure-play ecommerce sites will be able to win in established markets if they use generically descriptive domains which make building brand awareness and perceived differentiation next to impossible.

Target not only shut down cooking.com, but they didn't even bother redirecting the domain name to an associated part of their website.

It is now listed for sale.

Many short & generic domain names are guaranteed to remain in a purgatory status.

• The price point is typically far too high for a passionate hobbyist to buy them & attempt to turn them into something differentiated.
• The names are too generic for a bigger company to do much with them as a secondary option
  • the search relevancy & social discovery algorithms are moving away from generic toward brand
  • retailers have to save their best ideas for their main branded site
  • the rise of cross-device tracking + ad retargeting further incentivize them to focus exclusively on a single bigger site

At the abstract level, if many people believe in something then it will grow.

The opposite is also true.

And in a limitless, virtual world, you can not see what is not there.

The Yahoo Directory

Before I got into search, the Yahoo! Directory was so important to the field of search there were entire sessions at SES conferences on how to get listed & people would even recommend using #1AAA-widgets.com styled domains to alphaspam listings to the top of the category.

The alphaspam technique was a carry over from yellow page directories - many of which have went through bankruptcy as attention & advertising shifted to the web.

Go to visit the Yahoo! Directory today and you get either a server error, a security certificate warning, or a redirect to aabacosmallbusiness.com.

Poof.

It's gone.

Before the Yahoo! Directory disappeared their quality standards were vastly diminished. As a webmaster who likes to test things, I tried submitting sites of various size and quality to different places. Some sites which would get rejected by some $10 directories were approved in the Yahoo! Directory.

The Yahoo! Directory also had a somewhat weird setting where if you canceled a directory listing in the middle of the term they would often keep it listed for many years to come - for free. After many SEOs became fearful of links the directory saw vastly reduced rates of submissions & many existing listings canceled their subscriptions, thus leaving it as a service without much of a business model.

DMOZ

At one point Google's webmaster guidelines recommended submitting to DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, but that recommendation led to many lesser directories sprouting up & every few years Google would play a whack-a-mole game and strip PageRank or stop indexing many of them.

Many have presumed DMOZ was on its last legs many times over the past decade. But on their 18th birthday they did a spiffy new redesign.

Different sections of the site use different color coding and the design looks rather fresh and inviting.

Take a look.

However improved the design is, it is unlikely to reverse this ranking trend.

Lacking Engagement

Why did those rankings decline though? Was it because the sites suck? Or was it because the criteria to rank changed? If the sites were good for many years it is hard to believe the quality of the sites all declined drastically in parallel.

What happened is as engagement metrics started getting folded in, sites that only point you to other sites become an unneeded step in the conversion funnel, in much the same way that Google scrubbed affiliates from the AdWords ecosystem as unneeded duplication.

What is wrong with the user experience of a general web directory? There isn't any single factor, but a combination of them...

• the breadth of general directories means their depth must necessarily be limited.
• general directory category pages ranking in search results is like search results in search results. it isn't great from the user's perspective.
• if a user already knows a category well they would likely prefer to visit a destination site rather than a category page.
• if a user doesn't already know a category, then they would prefer to use an information source which prioritizes listing the best results first. the layout for most general web directories is a list of results which are typically in alphabetical order rather than displaying the best result first
• in order to sound authoritative many directories prefer to use a neutral tone

If a directory mostly links to lower quality sites Google can choose to either not index it or not trust links from it. And even if a directory generally links to trustworthy sites, Google doesn't need to rank it to extract most the value from it.

The trend of lower traffic to the top tier general directory sites has happened across the board.

Many years ago Google's remote rater guidelines cited Joeant as a trustworthy directory.

Their traffic chart looks like this.

And the same sort of trend is true for BOTW, Business.com, GoGuides.org, etc.

There is basically nothing a general web directory can do to rank well in Google on a sustainable basis, at least not in the English language.

Even if you list every school in the city of Winnipeg that page can't rank if it isn't indexed & even if it is indexed it won't rank well if your site has a Panda-related ranking issue. There are a couple other issues with such a comprehensive page:

• each additional listing is more editorial content cost in terms of building the page AND maintaining the page
• the bigger the page gets the more a user needs something other than alphabetical order as a sort option
• the more listings there are in a tight category the more the likelihood there will be excessive keyword repetition on the page which could get the page flagged for algorithmic demotion, even if the publisher has no intent to spam. Simply listing things by their name will mean repeating a word like "school" over 100 times on the above linked Winnipeg schools page. If you don't consciously attempt to lower the count a page like that could have the term repeated over 300 times.

Knock On Effects

In addition to those web directories getting fewer paid submissions, most are likely seeing a rise in link removal requests. Google's "fear first" approach to relevancy has even led them to listing DMOZ as an unnatural link source in warning emails to webmasters.

What's more, many people who use automated link clean up tools take the declining traffic charts & low rankings of the sites as proof that the links lack value or quality.

That means anyone who gets hit by a penalty & ends up in warning messages not only ends up with less traffic while penalized, but they also get extra busy work to do while trying to fix whatever the core problem is.

And in many cases fixing the core problem is simply unfeasible without a business model change.

When general web directories are defunded it not only causes many of them to go away, but it also means other related sites and services disappear.

• Editors of those web directories who were paid to list quality sites for free.
• Web directory review sites.
• SEOs, internet marketers & other businesses which listed in those directories

Now perhaps general web directories no longer really add much value to the web & they are largely unneeded.

But there are other things which are disappearing in parallel which were certainly differentiated & valuable, though perhaps not profitable enough to maintain the "relevancy" footprint to compete in a brand-first search ecosystem.

Depth vs Breadth

Unless you are the default search engine (Google) or the default social network everyone is on (Facebook), you can't be all things to all people.

If you want to be differentiated in a way that turns you into a destination you can't compete on a similar feature set because it is unlikely you will be able to pay as much for traffic-driven partnerships as the biggest players can.

Can niche directories or vertical directories still rank well? Sure, why not.

Sites like Yelp & TripAdvisor have succeeded in part by adding interactive elements which turned them into sought after destinations.

Part of becoming a destination is intentionally going out of their way to *NOT* be neutral platforms. Consider how many times Yelp has been sued by businesses which claimed the sales team did or was going to manipulate the displayed reviews if the business did not buy ads. Users tend to trust those platforms precisely because other users may leave negative reviews & that (usually) offers something better than a neutral and objective editorial tone.

And that user demand for those reviews, of course, is why Google stole reviews from those sorts of sites to try to prop up the Google local places pages.

It was a point of differentiation which was strong enough that people wanted it over Google. So Google tried to neutralize the advantage.

Blogs

The above section is about general directories, but the same concept applies to almost any type of website.

Consider blogs.

A decade ago feed readers were commonplace, bloggers often cross-linked & bloggers largely drove the conversation which bubbled up through mainstream media.

Google Reader killed off RSS feed readers by creating a fast, free & ad-free competitor. Then Google abruptly shut down Google Reader.

Not only do whimsical blogs like Least Helpful or Cute Overload arbitrarily shut down, but people like Chris Pirillo who know tech well suggest blogging is (at least economically) dead.

Many of the people who are quitting are not the dumb, the lazy, and the undifferentiated. Rather many are the wise trend-aware players who are highly differentiated yet find it impossible to make the numbers work:

The conversation started when revenues were down, and I had to carry payroll for a month or two out of my personal account, which I had not had to do since shortly after we started this whole project. We tweaked some things (added an ad or two which we had stripped back for the redesign, reminded people about ad-blockers and their impact on our ability to turn a profit, etc.) and revenue went back up a bit, but for a hot minute, you’ll remember I was like: “Theoretically, if this industry went further into the ground which it most assuredly will, would we want to keep running the site as a vanity project? Probably not! We would just stop doing it.”

In the current market Google can conduct a public relations campaign on a topic like payday loans, have their PR go viral & then if you mention "oh yeah, so Google is funding the creation of doorway pages to promote payday loans" it goes absolutely nowhere, even if you do it DURING THE NEWS CYCLE.

So much of what exists is fake that anything new is evaluated from the perception of suspicion.

While the real (and important) news stories go nowhere & the PR distortions spread virally, the individual blogger ends up feeling a bit soulless if they try to make ends meet:

"The American Mama reached tens of thousands of readers monthly, and under that name I worked with hundreds of big name brands on sponsored campaigns. I am a member of virtually every ‘blog network’ and agency that “connects brands with bloggers”. ... What’s the point of having your own space to write if you’re being paid to sound like you work for a corporation? ... PR Friendly says “For the right price, I will be anyone you want me to be.” ... I’m not saying blogging is dying, but this specific little monster branch of it, sponsored content disguised as horribly written “day in the life” stories about your kids and pets? It can’t possibly last. Do you really want to be stuck on the inside when it crumbles?"

If you can't get your own site to grow enough to matter then maybe it makes sense to contribute to someone else's to get your name out there.

I recently received this unsolicited email:

"Hello! This is Theodore, a writer and chief editor at SomeSiteName.Com I noticed that you are accepting paid reviews online and you will be glad to know that now you can also publish your Sponsored content to SomeSite via me. SomeSite.Com is a leading website which deals in Technology, Social Media, Internet Stuff and Marketing. It was also tagged as Top 10 _____ websites of 2016 by [a popular magazine]. Website Stats- Alexa Rank: [below 700] Google PageRank: 6/10 Monthly Pageviews: 5+ Million Domain Authority: 85+ Price : $500 via PayPal (Once off Payment) Let me know if you are interested and want to feature your website product like nothing! This will not only increase your traffic but increase in overall SEO Score as well. Thanks"

That person was not actually a member of that site's team, but they had found a way to get their content published on it.

In part because that sort of stuff exists, Google tries to minimize the ability for reputation to flow across sites.

The large platforms are so smug, so arrogant, they actually state the following sort of crap in interviews:

"There's a space in the world for art, but that's different from trying to build products at scale. The one thing that does make me a little nervous is a lot of my designer friends are still focused building websites and I'm not sure that's a growth business anymore. If you look at people who are doing interesting work, they tend to be building inside these platforms like Facebook and finding ways to do interesting work in there. For instance, journalists. Instant Articles is a really great way for stories to be told."

Sure you can bust your ass to build up Facebook, but when their business model changes (bye social gaming companies, hello live streaming video) best of luck trying to follow them.

And if you starve during the 7 lean years in between when your business model is once again well aligned with Facebook you can't go back in time to give yourself a meal to un-starve.

Content Farms

Ehow.com has removed *MILLIONS* of pages of content since getting hit by Panda. And yet their ranking chart looks like this

What is crazy is the above chart actually understates the actual declines, because the shift of search to mobile & increasing prevalence of ads in the search results means estimates of organic search traffic may be overstated significantly compared to a few years prior.

A half-decade ago a bootstrapped eHow competitor named ArticlesBase got some buzz in TechCrunch because they were making about $500,000 a month on about 20 million monthly unique visitors. That business was recently listed on Flippa. They are getting about a half-million unique monthly visitors (off 95%) and about $2,000 a month in revenues (off about 99.6%).

The negative karma with that site (in terms of ability to rank) is so bad that the site owner suggested on Flippa to publish any new content from new authors onto different websites: "its not going to get to 0 as most of the traffic is not google today, but we would suggest to push out the fresh daily incoming content to new sites - thats where the growth is."

Now a person could say "eHow deserves to die" and maybe they are right. BUT one could easily counter that point by noting...

• the public who owns the shares owns the ongoing losses & many top insiders cashed out long ago
• Google was getting a VIG on eHow on their ride up & is still collecting one on the way down (along with funding other current parallel projects from the very same people with the very same Google ad network)
• Demand Media's partner program where they syndicate eHow-like content to newspapers like USA Today keeps growing at 15% to 20% a year (similar process, author, content, business model, etc. ... only a different URL hosting the content)
• look at this and you'll see how many publishing networks are still building the same sort of content but are cross-marketing across networks of sites. What's more some of the same names are at the new plays. For example, Demand Media's founder was the chairman of an SEO firm bought by Hearst publishing & his wife is on the about us page of Evolve Media's ModernMom.com

The wrappers around the content & masthead logos change, but by and large the people and strategies don't change anywhere near as quickly.

Web Portals & News Sites

As the mainstream media gets more desperate, they are more willing to partner with the likes of Demand Media to get any revenue they can.

You see the reality of this desperation in the stock charts for newspaper companies.

Or how about this chart for Yahoo.com.

It doesn't look particularly bad, especially if you consider that Yahoo has shut down many of their vertical sites.

Underlying flat search traffic charts misses declining publisher CPMs and the click traffic mix shift away from organic toward paid search channels as search traffic shifts to mobile devices & Google relentlessly increases the size of the search ads. Yahoo may still rank #3 for keyword x, but if that #3 ranking is below the fold on both mobile and desktop devices they might need to rank #1 to get as much traffic as #3 got a couple years ago.

Yahoo! was once the leading search portal & now they are worth about 1/5th of LinkedIn (after backing out their equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan).

The chart is roughly flat, but the company is up for a fire sale because organic search result displacement & the value of traffic has declined quicker than Yahoo! can fire employees & none of their Hail Mary passes worked.

Ms. Mayer compared the [Polyvore] deal to Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006, arguing that “you can never overpay” for a company with the potential to land a huge new base of users.
...
“Her core mistake was this belief that she could reinvent Yahoo,” says a former senior executive who left the company last year. “There was an element of her being a true believer when everyone else had stopped.”

The same line of thinking was used to justify the Tumblr acquisition, which has went nowhere fast - just like their 50+ other acquisitions.

Yahoo! shut down many verticals, fired many workers, sold off some real estate & is exploring selling their patents.

Chewing Up the Value Chain

Smaller devices that are harder to use means the gateways have to try to add more features to maintain relevance.

As they add features, publishers get displaced:

The Web will only expand into more aspects of our lives. It will continue to change every industry, every company, and every life on the planet. The Web we build today will be the foundation for generations to come. It’s crucial we get this right. Do we want the experiences of the next billion Web users to be defined by open values of transparency and choice, or the siloed and opaque convenience of the walled garden giants dominating today?

And if converting on mobile is hard or inconvenient, many people will shift to the defaults they know & trust, thus choosing to buy on Amazon rather than a smaller ecommerce website. One of my friends who was in ecommerce for many years stated this ultimately ended up becoming the problem with his business. People would email him back and forth about the product, related questions, and basically go all the way through the sales process with getting him to answer every concern & recommend each additional related product needed, then at the end they would ask him to price match Amazon & if he couldn't they would then buy from Amazon. If he had more scale he might have been able to get a better price from suppliers and compete with Amazon on price, but his largest competitor who took out warehouse space also filed for bankruptcy because they were unable to make the interest payments on their loans.

We live in a society which over-values ease-of-use & scale while under-valuing expertise.

Look at how much consolidation there has been in the travel market since Google Flights launched & Google went pay-to-play with hotel search.

Expedia owns Travelocity & Orbitz. Priceline owns Kayak. Yahoo! Travel simply disappeared. TripAdvisor is strong, but even they were once a part of Expedia.

How different are the remaining OTAs? One could easily argue they are less differentiated than this article about the history of the travel industry makes Skift against other travel-related news sites.

How many markets are strong enough to support the creation of that sort of featured editorial content?

Not many.

And most companies which can create that sort of in-depth content leverage the higher margins on shallower & cheaper content to pay for that highly differentiated featured content creation.

But if the knowledge graph and new search features are simply displacing the result set the number of people who will be able to afford creating that in-depth featured content is only further diminished.

Over 5 years ago Bing's Stefan Weitz mentioned they wanted to move search from a web of nouns to a web of verbs & to "look at the web as a digital representation of the physical world." Some platforms are more inclusive than Google is & decide to partner rather than displace, but Bing's partnership with Yelp or TripAdvisor doesn't help you if you are a direct competitor of Yelp or TripAdvisor, or if your business was heavily reliant on one of these other channels & you fall out of favor with them.

Chewing Up Real Estate

There are so many enhanced result features in the search results it is hard to even attempt to make an exhaustive list.

As search portals rush to add features they also rush to grab real estate & outright displace the concept of "10 blue links."

There has perhaps been nothing which captured the sentiment better than

.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014

The following is paraphrased, but captures the intent to displace the value chain & the roll of publishers.

"the journeys of users. their desire to be taken and sort of led and encouraged to proceed, especially on mobile devices (but I wouldn't say only on mobile devices).
...
there are a lot of users who are happy to be provided with encouragement and leads to more and more interesting information and related, grouped in groups, leading lets say from food to restaurants, from restaurants to particular types of restaurants, from particular types of restaurants to locations of those types of restaurants, ordering, reservations.

I'm kind of hungry, and in a few minutes you've either ordered food or booked a table. Or I'm kind of bored, and in a few minutes you've found a book to read or a film to watch, or some other discovery you are interested in." - Andrey Lipattsev

What role do publishers have in the above process? Unpaid data sources used to train algorithms at Facebook & Google?

Individually each of these assistive search feature roll outs may sound compelling, but ultimately they defund publishing.

Looks like Symptom Cards will lead to additional, more-focused searches (& not to third party sites.) #seo pic.twitter.com/vhkz5ZflMJ— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 20, 2016

Not a "Google Only" Problem

People may think I am unnecessarily harsh toward Google in my views, but this sort of shift is not a Google-only thing. It is something all the large online platforms are doing. I simply give Google more coverage because they have a history of setting standards & moving the market, whereas a player like Yahoo! is acting out of desperation to simply try to stay alive. The market capitalization of the companies reflect this.

Google & Facebook control the ecosystem. Everyone else is just following along.

"digital is eating legacy media, mobile is eating digital, and two companies, Facebook and Google, are eating mobile. ... Since 2011, desktop advertising has fallen by about 10 percent, according to Pew. Meanwhile mobile advertising has grown by a factor of 30 ... Facebook and Google, control half of net mobile ad revenue." - Derek Thompson

The same sort of behavior is happening in China, where Google & Facebook are prohibited from competing.

As publishers get displaced and defunded online platforms can literally buy the media: “There’s very little downside. Even if we lose money it won’t be material,” Alibaba's Mr. Tsai said. “But the upside [in buying SCMP] is quite interesting.”

The above quote was on Alibaba buying the newspaper of record in Hong Kong.

As bad as entire industries becoming token purchases may sound, that is the optimistic view. :D

Facebook's Instant Articles and Google's AMP those make a token purchase unnecessary: "I don't think it's any secret that you're going to see a bloodbath in the next 12 months," Vice Media's Shane Smith said, referring to digital media and broadcast TV. "Facebook has bought two-thirds of the media companies out there without spending a dime."

Those services can dictate what gets exposure, how it is monetized, and then adjust the exposure and revenue sharing over time to keep partners desperate & keep them hooked.

“If Thiel and Nick Denton were just a couple of rich guys fighting over a 1st Amendment edge case, it wouldn't be very interesting. But Silicon Valley has unprecedented, monopolistic power over the future of journalism. So much power that its moral philosophy matters.” - Nate Silver

Give them just enough (false) hope to stay partnered.

All the while track user data more granularly & run AI against it to disintermediate & devalue partners.

TV networks are aware of the risks of disintermediation and view Netflix with more suspicion than informed SEOs view Google:

for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.
...
“ ‘Breaking Bad’ was 10 times more popular once it started streaming on Netflix.” - Michael Nathanson
...
the networks couldn’t walk away from the company either. Many of them needed licensing fees from Netflix to make up for the revenue they were losing as traditional viewership shrank.

And just like Netflix, Facebook will move into original content production.

The Wiki

Wikipedia is certainly imperfect, but it is also a large part of why other directories have went away. It is basically a directory tied to an encyclopedia which is free and easy to syndicate.

Every large search & discovery platform has an incentive for Wikipedia to be as expansive as possible.

The bigger Wikipedia gets, the more potential answers and features can be sourced from it. More knowledge graph, more instant answers, more organic result displacement, more time on site, more ad clicks.

Even if a knowledge graph listing is wrong, the harm done by it doesn't harm the search service syndicating the content unless people create a big deal of the error. But if that happens then people will give feedback on how to fix the error & that is a PR lead into the narrative of how quickly search is improving and evolving.

"Wikipedia used to instruct its authors to check if content could be dis-intermediated by a simple rewrite, as part of the criteria for whether an article should be added to wikipedia. There are many rascals on the Internets; none deserving of respect." - John Andrews

Sergy Brin donates to fund the expansion of Wikipedia. Wikipedia rewrites more webmaster content. Google has more knowledge graph grist and rich answers to further displace publishers.

I recently saw the new gray desktop search results Google is tested. When those appear the knowledge graph appears inline with the regular search results & even on my huge monitor the organic result set is below the fold.

The problem with that is if your brand name is the same brand name that is in the knowledge graph & you are not the dominant interpretation then you are below the fold on all devices for your core brand UNLESS you pay Google for every single click.

How much should a brand like The Book of Life pay Google for being a roadblock? What sort of tax is appropriate & reasonable? How high will you bid in a casino where the house readjusts the shuffle & deal order in the middle of the hand?

I recently did a search on Bing & inside their organic search results they linked to a Mahalo-like page called Bing Knows. I guess this is a feature in China, but it could certainly spread to other markets.

If they partnered with an eBay or Amazon.com and put a "buy now" button in the search results they'd have just about completely closed the loop there.

Broad Commodification

The reason I started this article with directories is their role is to link to sites. They are categorized collections of links which have been heavily commodified & devalued to the point they are rendered unnecessary and viewed adversely by much of the SEO market (even the ones with decent editorial standards).

Just like links got devalued, so did domain names.

And, as mentioned above in the parts about blogging, content farms, web portals & news sites ... the same trend is happening to almost every type of content.

Online ad revenues are still growing quickly, but they are not flowing through to old media & many former leading bloggers consider blogging dead.

Big platform players like Google and Facebook broaden cross-device user tracking to create new relevancy signals and extract most the value created by publisher. The more information the platform owns the more of a starving artist the partners become.

As partners become more desperate, they overvalue growth (just like Yahoo! with Polyvore):

"It's the golden age right now," [Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer] said. "If you're a digital publisher, you have every big TV company calling you. When I look at media brands, if a media brand disappeared tomorrow, would I notice?" he said. "And there are a bunch of brands that have scale, and maybe a lot of money raised, and maybe this and that, but, actually, I might not know for a year. There's so many brands like that. Like, what does it really stand for? Why does it exist?"

Disruption is not a strategy, but the whole point of accelerating it & pushing it (without an adequate plan for "what's next") is to re-establish feudal lords.

The web is a virtual land where the commodity which matters most is attention. If you go back in time, lords maintained wealth & control through extracting rents.

A few years ago a quote like the following one may have sounded bizarre or out of place

These are the people who guard the company’s status as what ranking team head Amit Singhal often sees characterised as “the biggest kingmaker on this Earth.”

But if you view it through the some historical context it isn't hard to understand

"The nobles still had the power to write the law, and in a series of moves that took place in different countries at different times, they taxed the bazaar, broke up the guilds, outlawed local currencies, and bestowed monopoly charters on their favorite merchants. ... It was never really about efficiency anyway; industrialization was about restoring the power of those at the top by minimizing the value and price of human laborers." - Douglas Rushkoff

Google funding LendUp & ranking their doorway pages while hitting the rest of the industry is Google bestowing "monopoly charters on their favorite merchants."

Headwinds

The issue is not that the value of anything drops to zero, but rather a combine set of factors shrinks down the size of the market which can be profitably served. Each of these factors eat at margins...

• lower CPMs
• the rise of ad blockers (funded largely by some big ad networks paying to allow their own ads through while blocking competing ad networks)
• rise of programmatic ads (which shift advertiser budget away from publisher to various forms of management)
• larger ad sizes: "Based on early testing, some advertisers have reported increases in clickthrough rates of up to 20% compared to current text ads. "
• increase of vertical search results in Google & more ads + self-hosted content in Facebook's feed
• shift of search audience to mobile devices which have no screen real estate for organic search results and lower cost per click (there's a reason Google AdSense is publishing tips on making more from mobile)
• increased algorithmic barrier to entry and longer delay times to rank

The least sexy consultant pitch in the world: "Sure I can probably rank your website, but it will take a year or two, cost you at least $80,000 per year, and you will still be below the fold even if we get to #1 because the paid search ads fill up the first screen of results."

That isn't going to be an appealing marketing message for a new small business with a limited budget.

The Formula

“The open web is pretty broken. ... Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale” - Ev Williams.

The above article profiling Ev Williams also states: "An April report from the web-analytics company Parse.ly found that Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites."

The same general trend is happening to almost every form of content - video, news, social, etc..

• a big platform over-promotes a vertical to speed up buy-in (perhaps even offering above market rates or other forms of compensation to get the flywheel started)
• other sources join the market without that compensation & then the compensation stream gets yanked
• displacement of the source by a watered down copy (eHow or Wikipedia styled rewrite), or some zero-cost licensing arrangement (Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, syndicating Wikipedia rewrites)
• strategic defunding of the content source
• promise of future gains causing desperate publishers to lean harder into Google or Facebook even as they squeeze more water out of the rock.

Hey, sure your traffic is declining & your revenue is declining faster. You are getting squeezed out, but if you trust the primary players responsible for the shift & rely on Instant Articles or Google's AMP this time will be different.

...or maybe not...

Facts & Opinions

When I saw some Google shills syndicating Google's "you can't copyright facts" pitch without question I cringed, because I knew where that was immediately headed.

A year later the trend was obvious.

The Internet commoditized the distribution of facts. The "news" media responded by pivoting wholesale into opinions and entertainment.— Naval Ravikant (@naval) May 26, 2016

So now we get story pitches where the author tries to collect a few quote sources to match the narrative already in their head. Surely this has gone on for a long time, but it has rarely been so transparently obvious and cringeworthy as it is today.

How modern journalism works pic.twitter.com/i2CRnwAWZy— Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) June 15, 2016

And if you stray too far from facts into opinions & are successful, don't be surprised if you end up on the receiving end of proxy lawsuits:

Can we talk about how strange it is for a group of Silicon Valley startup mentors to embrace secret proxy litigation as a business tactic? To suddenly get sanctimonious about what is published on the internet and called News? To shame another internet company for not following ‘the norms’ of a legacy industry? The hypocrisy is mind bending.

The desperation is so bad news sites don't even attempt to hide it. And part of what is driving that is bot-driven content further eroding margins on legitimate publishing. Google not only ranks those advertorials, but they also promote some of the auto-generated articles which read like:

As many as 1 analysts, the annual sales target for company name, Inc. (NYSE:ticker) stands at $45.13 and the median is $45.13 for the period closed 3.

The bearish target on sales is $45.13 and the bullish estimate is $45.13, yielding a standard deviation of 1.276%.

Not more than 1 investment entities have updated sales projections on upside over the last week while 1 have downgraded their previously provided sales targets. The estimates highlight a net change of 0% over the last 1 weeks period.

Sales estimated amount is a foremost parameter in judging a firm’s performance. Nearly 1 analysts have revised sales number on the upside in last one month and 1 have lowered their targets. It demonstrates a net cumulative change of 0% in targets against sales forecasts which were given a month ago.

In latest quarterly period, 1 have revised targeted sales on upside and 1 have decreased their projections. It demonstrates change of 4.898%.

I changed a few words in each sentence of that quote to make it harder to find the source as I wasn't trying to out them specifically. But the auto-generated content was ranked by Google & monetized via inline Google AdSense ads promoting the best marijuana stocks to invest in and warning of a pending 80% stock market crash coming soon this year.

Hey at least it isn't a TOTALLY fake story!

Publishers get the message loud and clear. Tronc wants to ramp up on AI driven video content at scale:

"There's all these really new, fun features we're going to be able to do with artificial intelligence and content to make videos faster," Ferro told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. "Right now, we're doing a couple hundred videos a day; we think we should be doing 2,000 videos a day."

All is well, news & information are just externalities to a search engine ad network.

No big deal.

"With newspapers dying, I worry about the future of the republic. We don’t know yet what’s going to replace them, but we do already know it’s going to be bad." - Charlie Munger

Build a Brand

Build a brand, that way you are protected from the rapacious tech platforms.

Or so the thinking goes.

But that leads back to the above image where The Book of Life is below the fold on their own branded search query because there is another interpretation Google feels is more dominant.

The big problem with "brand as solution" is you not only have to pay to build a brand, but then you have to pay to protect it.

And the number of search "innovations" to try to siphon off some late funnel branded traffic and move it back up the funnel to competitors (to force the brand to pay again for their own brand to try to displace the "innovations") will only continue growing.

And at any point in time if Disney makes a movie using your brand name as the name of the movie, you are irrelevant and need of a rebrand overnight, unless you commit to paying Google for your brand forever.

Having an offline location can be a point of strength and a point of differentiation. But it can also be a reason for Google to re-route user traffic through more Google owned & controlled pages.

Further, most large US offline retailers are doing horrible.

Almost all the offline growth is in stores selling dirt cheap unbranded imported stuff like Dollar General or Family Dollar & stores like Ross and TJ Maxx which sell branded item remainders at discount prices. And as Amazon gets more efficient by the day, other competitors with high cost structures & less efficient operations grow relatively less efficient over time.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about a rift between Wal-Mart & Procter & Gamble: “They sell crappy private label, so you buy Swiffer with a crappy refill,” said one of the people familiar with the product changes. “And then you don’t buy again.”

In trying to drive sales growth, P&G is resorting to some Yahoo!-like desperate measures, included meetings where "Some workers donned gladiator-like armor for the occasion."

Riding on other platforms or partners carries the same sorts of risks as trusting Google or Facebook too much.

Even owning a strong brand name and offline distribution does not guarantee success. Sears already spun out their real estate & they are looking to sell the Kenmore & Craftsman brands.

The big difference between the web and offline platforms is the marginal cost of information is zero, so they can quickly & cheaply spread to adjacent markets in ways that physically constrained offline players can not & some of the big web platforms have far more data on people than governments do. It is worth noting one of the things that came out of the Snowden leaks is spooks were leveraging Google's DoubleClick cookies for tracking users.

As desperate stores/platforms see slowing growth they squeeze for margins and seek to accelerate growth any way possible. Chasing growth ultimately leads to the promise of what differentiates them disappearing. I recently bought some "hand crafted" soaps on Etsy, which shipped from Shenzen.

I am not sure how that impacts other artisinal soap sellers, but it makes me less likely to buy that sort of product from Etsy again.

And for as much as I like shopping on Amazon, I was uninspired when a seller recently sent me this.

Amazon might usually be great for buyers & great for affiliates, but hearing how they are quickly expanding their private label offerings wouldn't be welcome news for a merchant who is overly-reliant on them for sales in any of those categories.

The above sort of activity is what is going on in the real world even among brands which are not under attack.

The domestic economic landscape is getting quite ugly:

America’s economy today is in some respects more concentrated than it was during the Gilded Age, whose excesses prompted the Progressive Era reforms the FTC exemplifies. In sector after sector, from semiconductors and cable providers to eyeglass manufacturers and hotels, a handful of companies dominate. These giants use their market power to hike prices for consumers and suppress wages for workers, worsening inequality. Consolidation also appears to be driving a dramatic decline in entrepreneurship, closing off opportunity and suppressing growth. Concentration of economic power, in turn, tends to concentrate political power, which incumbents use to sway policies in their favor, further entrenching their dominance.

And the local abusive tech monopolies are now firmly promoting the TPP: "make it more difficult for TPP countries to block Internet sites" = countries should have less influence over the web than individual Facebook or Google engineers do.

In a land of algorithmic false positives that cause personal meltdowns and organizational breakdowns there is nothing wrong at all with that!

I kept waiting. For a year and a half, I waited. The revenues kept trickling down. It was this long terrible process, losing half overnight but then also roughly 3% a month for a year and a half after. It got to the point where we couldn’t pay our bills. That’s when I reached out again to Matt Cutts, “Things never got better.” He was like, “What, really? I’m sorry.” He looked into it and was like, “Oh yeah, it never reversed. It should have. You were accidentally put in the bad pile.”

Luckily the world can depend on China to drive growth and it will save us.

Or maybe there is a small problem with that line of thinking...

Beijing’s intellectual property regulator has ordered Apple Inc. to stop sales of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the city, ruling that the design is too similar to a Chinese phone, in another setback for the company in a key overseas market.

Can any experts chime in on this?

Let's see...

First, there is Wal-Mart selling off their Chinese e-commerce operation to the #2 Chinese ecommerce company & then there's this from the top Chinese ecommerce company:

“The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names. They are exactly the same factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names.” - Alibaba's Jack Ma

Watch on YouTube

Video Background

Christopher Angus is a longtime friend of Stella Huh. Together they were able to launder investor money into the Wall companies, which led to the SEC's Barton Recievership.

One should never lose confidence, no matter how many crimes they commit, even if they are a racketeering criminal, right Chris?

This video is part of a confidence series, providing free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This fifteenth video is 22:12 & was shared on June 8, 2016. The investment guru who shared this video delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18693916.conman-christopher-angus-pay-back-just-1-2m-scam/
Crown Police never followed the money trail.

Christopher Angus is associated with Stella Huh and Timothy Barton, who stand trial in the United States on November 2, 2026.
http://www.seobook.com/stella-huh/criminal-case-docket-sheet%204-22-2026-(22-cr-00352).pdf

Video Highlights

6 minutes 25 seconds: highlights autonomous trading system he was allegedly testing

A version of this video is available for download at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/byvusm7irw28yb3/video%2014%202016%20june%208.flv?dl=0

Video Transcript

00:00 Christopher Angus: Hello Mr. A just a quick video, take nine 'cause the other ones ran for like half an hour while I was talking through the market commentary. But it's so fucking dead that I was like, "There's just nothing happening, there's nothing to talk about." I'm gonna try and do this in like two minutes now, because the last one was 48 minutes and I've just scrapped it because fucking bollocks. So basically I just wanna talk through yesterday. Let's get this chart looking decent, alright. So yesterday this was... This is the... Go back one more day 'cause this was Monday, right? This was Monday nothing, nothing, nothing. This is kind of the time when you get interested. The bond market opens around here. The VIX came off and they went up about three ticks mark S&P didn't reflect that, there was no trade, it came back down there and it just closed. There was just nothing to do on that day. Yesterday there was... It looked as though perhaps there was an opportunity. So if you look around this area where it gets a bit choppy this is when the market... This is when the bonds open. And in the markets you know pre-market and all that kind of stuff, and obviously the open at 2:30, but this is really when you start warming up, but you can see nothing happened, it was flat all day and then it popped three ticks, but the thing to notice here it popped at 8:00 so one hour before the close and it went up one tick and then you would probably wanna...

01:39 Christopher Angus: If you were even considering getting in there it would be there. So, now you've only got... Now you've gotta get past one tick to to beat the spread and break even and get one more tick and you would have had to hold this. This is actually past... Yes it's a quarter past nine just before that futures do properly close just to make one tick. There was no close. Okay, now here today was flat, flat, flat, flat, flat and we've had a big pop. No, actually a three-point pop. That's a three-point pop. Well, maybe a little more. Let's have a look here, 63 to 1503. So it's a four-point pop, alright? Except I'm not buying it. In the last video I said that I made a little hour and I said, "This is why we don't buy it here." Even though it's tempting we do a...

02:32 Christopher Angus: I did a little X and then I said, it's gonna... Then I drew the line and it broke through the line, but the video is like 48 minutes. Okay, and I'll do the same here. I wanna say I'll do the up arrow and then I'll do... I'll do a line here with a little X, alright. We don't buy it here because it will come back on you, alright? This is bound to hurt you. This market, it's really bound to hurt you. So a point to the video was just to go through the last couple of days and there's just fucking nothing going on. I really thought we could squeeze a trade out today because it's so tightly wound, but it looks like it's gonna go for the highs and that's just gonna... It's gonna be 20 points off the high. Fucking noisy man, on the streets, living in Oxford. Fucking cunts. Anyway excuse my language. So this is the VIX. I've gotta pop out S&P chart somewhere.

03:33 Christopher Angus: I have like all these pop out charts, which I'm laying over here as I'm trying to multi... Multi-manage everything with demos and stuff and I'm... Okay, can I pop this out here otherwise. Is this a pop-out. Come on, how do I pop you, no, alright, okay, here's the pop, right. So if we... The S&Ps come off here in the last hour, but if we make it through this line here, I drew this in the last video. The S&P will explode, right? So there's another chart, I can't pop it out, but we're actually on some support and I don't do technical analysis, but support resistance is the only thing like I actually have a reasonable amounts of respect for. All the other like penance and bull flags and all that other nonsense is just random fucking gibberish. Look, we're at this line here, yeah. We're gonna have a little rest here. We may go half a tick... Half a point down through here, but my... This is the S&P now it's not the VIX, the S&P is probably gonna rest here and then it's going back up.

04:56 Christopher Angus: I'll do a little arrow so we know. There it's going back up, alright? I could be wrong, I'm not in the trades I don't really give a shit, but this is why I'm not taking a trade, because I think it's going up and it's gonna keep driving the VIX down. So, like I said, I did all these arrows going, this is where the VIX is going, this is where the VIX is going, this is where the VIX is going and the VIX has come back up, but I feel very strongly here that the S&P is going to keep looking for higher highs. As I said, I could be wrong, it doesn't matter. If I'm wrong, I wish I was wrong because I'll just jump on a VIX trade. Please can I be wrong but I don't think I am. You know unfortunately, and I think that... I don't know if you can see I'm just make this a bit bigger.

05:50 Christopher Angus: This VIX will keep... This VIX like I said, I'm not buying it here, these little x's, I'm not buying it here, this is for the video, this is where the VIX is going. I did a little down arrows, this is where the VIX is going... We're going down. S&P is going up, right? We're having a little rest on the line. Just a bit tired. I could be wrong, hope I am 'cause we'd make some money.

06:13 Christopher Angus: But I don't think I am. Alright, so I'm just gonna make this a little smaller so I can keep an eye on it while I talk through this video, 'cause I'm gonna have to cut this soon so I can actually concentrate 'cause I'm... It will be a very shit video, 'cause I'll stay, I'll just stop talking. This is this system, autonomous, places its own trades, takes its own trades off. Put that VIX chart back on, places its own trades, put that... Determines how much profit to make. We trading, you can see is around 55 orders waiting to go to momentum, volume, things that, when there's a big volume spike and a momentum spike, we get in the way, we take a few points and then we get out. At the moment, it's running around one-to-one, so worth every point we make, every pound we make, we lose a pound, but we get the rebate.

07:10 Christopher Angus: Over time, if you take a snapshot in time, it may be a little bit out, maybe a little bit up, but on average, that's kind of where we work, that's what we... And so the thing is run-able at the moment. And basically we'll probably start running it pretty soon. So, I'm not just to pull it off although it's gonna disappear. I'll just show you. This is actually a VIX things. This is so I can get into positions and get out, pretty quickly, especially if the market's moving quickly, you don't wanna go full ball in straight at the same time. This is a very much more sophisticated version of that but I can do this for many other instruments that's purely for the VIX. If I wanted to run a bunch of hedges if I was really unsure of the market, I could have a bunch of scaling hedges that were going up and you can see it's only the demo, but it works out how much I need to buy and if I wanted to do a profit target according to this, you can see it's given me the correct profit target as well.

08:15 Christopher Angus: And I can drag these around I can make new groups and I can do all sorts of really really awesome things. And this is if I want a create hedges, if I just want open one sided legs, I could open template, so it's really quick. It's a very, very, very robust, powerful system that I've created over several years, at, you know at incredible cost really, not only coding cost, but experience cost. Okay, so there's an order that's just arrived and I'll just put that in. Now I rebooted everything just for the video. So this has been running for about an hour. So these trades haven't really had time to work there way out of the system. This is called the baby step strategy. So, you can see where all the big negatives are negative, negative, negative. That's why I just killed the system just so I could make a decent video, so we could start again, it'll be pretty clear. So if I just highlight these quickly, so we can see where we are.

09:25 Christopher Angus: Okay, so that's that. But you can see a side work. I just killed it for the video and the demo. Every single one of these as a winner, every single one, there's no losers here, none, out of everything today. From... Not today, that's from yesterday. Zero, everything's positive, doesn't make losses, doesn't make losses, doesn't make losses. And we were holding somewhat big losing positions here. Some of them have been open, as you can see, for close to well 20 hours, 20-30 hours. I think there. No, it's not 30 hours, that's like a 24 hours, I don't know. None of these would have closed for a loss. And that's just the strategy. So we've been running it for about an hour and it's like hardly any of the positions have opened or closed.

10:25 Christopher Angus: Basically, these are all the positions that hit minus three because three have already closed. And we just got to wait and see. So, so far up like 300 and something odd. Obviously, the P&L is not that good, but as you open a position you go into a big negative PL because you pay the spread, so you're always starting off in the negative PL position. So as the system starts, it doesn't look that good. But this is basically how it works. On average, if I'm running it all the time, it can probably make 200 or 300 trades a day and I'm running it very, very conservatively. I could probably jack it up to a thousand if we really wants to go full gun of it. But, it is better than delta neutral in terms of P&L. It is making money and where there's a lot of fine tuning yet to come. So yeah, I'm really, really excited by this, actually. Of course, it's... I give it like 60%, 60% hope, which is high. I've been working on this for weeks now, so. I've also got a bunch of other strategies which look really promising as well, 'cause once you start thinking about things searching and do other things, the ideas start to flow quite quickly. I'll put the VIX chart back on anyway.

12:00 Christopher Angus: So... Looking at the VIX like I said I don't believe the VIX is going up and as I said I hope I'm wrong we can make some money but we need to see a drive up now let the bulls get a bit exhausted take some profit, whatever they are gonna do which will then let the VIX pop half a point like a full pop not this like one tick every hour grind up because when in the slow moving markets, you do not know what's going on so if I put a trade on now and it's moving so slowly, there is no way to... The whole market's just locked. I'll put the S&P back on here... This is like two hours right this is two hours. That's 13 to 17, that's like four points and the two hours before it was the same its like a 4 point range that the markets are locked stiff. But I think this is the S&P chart.

13:22 Christopher Angus: Okay, it looks like it is breaking down, oh it is come off it's come off. I just say it is having a little rest on the line that's the support line and it's having another little rest but I would be very very surprised if we break through there substantially and I am drawing another line here at 13, that's four points below. If we make it through here and hold down here, then we got a chance to make some money today. But I really would be surprised if that happens very, very surprised. No we're struggling this week man we are struggling I feel fucking awful about it. I feel fucking awful but I can't, there is no point if I put on a trade we're just gonna end up losing a tick so you know what, there's no point, there's no point. I got to work on the other shit at the moment so here we are wonder if we made any more trades, this is called the baby step strategy I made this little report there, no nothing yet. Alright, let's see VIX is tick back down VIX again these arrows I say the VIX is going down. I'll even make them red, make them red, make them red, make it red. I need to go to a fucking bar or something, 'cause this is fucking driving me crazy... Right.

14:58 Christopher Angus: Okay, so let's put the S&P back on, remember having the rest on the line I said up what's going on, We are going back up if we can get through this. Why am I talking like this like im fucking doing some kind of tutoring video I have no idea. I apologize for that if we can get through this little area here, the S&P will explode guaranteed. If we hold above there for a few minutes and then we close above there, tomorrow, if not today, we will be pounding new record highs on the back of the worst jobs report in five years, on the back of the worst corporate earnings in years. Like I think this must be share buy backs. I don't even have know if Bloomberg turned on because they don't know what is going on either and so they're just making it up. They're just making it up. So this is the S&P we're watching here. I obviously, I've got a whole bunch of other stuff which I can see out of my left eye, which well not on my right monitor, which you can't see which helps me see what's going on, but fuck these pop-up charts they are going all over my things. Basically can pop the windows out, open positions, charts like I am doing here so I can move them across but the more you do that, the more they kind of end up floating back on to other pages and they're just obscuring all my other stuff and it's pissing me off.

16:29 Christopher Angus: I am sorry for all the moaning by the way, I kinda think I'm funny with my monologues but I think it comes across as very negative so I apologize. It's not meant that way, it's just meant to be funny, and also I'm a bit frustrated of course and I feel bad because I need to make some money for you guys and for me. You know, I think I don't like when it's like this, I don't like it. I don't care about... You know I don't need the money but still it's like the compounding thing, and it's annoying, it's annoying. Anyway. So, I'll sum this up.

17:21 Christopher Angus: The last two days have been shit, including today, and I really thought we could get a trade in and I'm looking very hard for one now. I'll try and squeeze a tick or two out if I can. If it gets too close to eight and we're doing what we did yesterday, I'll just have to stand on the side again. It's been a long time since we did three trades, three days in a row, with nothing. I can't sell the VIX at this level because if you saw what happened on Friday, the market sneezes and the VIX will explode up. It's just not worth the risk. If the VIX pops four points and we are...

18:02 Christopher Angus: It would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. It would be really fucking ugly. So I can't sell it at this level. It's not worth the risk. It's better to try and wait and just grab a few ticks if I can. Selling it at this level, and anything happens, it would just be, it's like double-digit loss. Do you know what I mean? Or high single digits, in one move, and it's just not worth it. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. So I hope I'm wrong and I think the S&P breaks from here, but I don't think it will.

18:41 Christopher Angus: A high frequency trading strategy, again, is an autonomous system. It makes its own decisions of where to place the orders. We're basically market making. So we're taking both sides of the market all the time. We are making more than I'm losing at the moment, but there's still a way to go. I think we're about 60% of the way, And too, I'm like on a high level, maybe of high momentum, high velocity to two, three, 400 trades a day. It could go higher, but that's kinda the comfortable level. And that's kind of it. You can see the trades going on and off. I think, these ones will probably go off here. These ones will go off. There's one that's come on. I wonder how... I'll just have one more look, see if anything else has closed. Yeah. So we've had, since I reset the system, what about hour and a half ago? We've made, how much is that 110, 264, 297. I don't know; like 400 or 500 quid. The rebate. We can see here actually we've made -10p thus far in the last 24 hours. But that's because I forced through a whole lot of trades and the rebate and the profit and loss are nearly identical. 121 positions closed and I've just been cocking with it and I forced a whole bunch of positions closed I would never do usually because I'm trying to do the video.

[pause]

20:57 Christopher Angus: Yeah. So this makes money. It needs to be fine tuned to make more. 60% probability, autonomous. I showed you the other stuff, I think, or this is like the ninth take. I can't remember what I've been saying. Because people have been phoning me, after being interrupted, the video's, the last video's 48 minutes, but it was just so nothing going on. Like I did the arrows and then that's all that happened in the last, over an hour now. I had to cut the video and just restart because it was no good. It was no good. So, I'll end the video now because otherwise it's just going to be more of the same. I'll just show you the S&P. Remember I said we're going to have a little rest on the line at the arrow and we are going up again, and we're going up. Can you see that? It's the S&P. We're going up, baby. Yeah, we may explode here, and the VIX is going to explode down. And that's why we can't buy the VIX, can't buy the VIX. I'm gonna end the video now 'cause I'm going mad. Bye.

Watch on YouTube

Video Background

Ill-reputed high finance investment criminal Christopher Angus is kicking off a confidence series, providing free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This thirteenth video is 13:53 & was shared on May 27, 2016. The criminal who shot these videos delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18693916.conman-christopher-angus-pay-back-just-1-2m-scam/
Crown Police never followed the money trail.

Christopher Angus is associated with Stella Huh and Timothy Barton, who stand trial in the United States on November 2, 2026.
http://www.seobook.com/stella-huh/criminal-case-docket-sheet%204-22-2026-(22-cr-00352).pdf

Video Highlights

• 0 minutes 25 seconds: if volatility stays low might have to shift strategy to try to trade for scratch trades which monetize via rebate
• 1 minute 35 seconds: mentions plateuing of earnings & what he sees coming for next couple years. eventually the S&P & markets in general will break down & there will be 1 or 2 big pops in VIX.
• 2 minutes 25 seconds: will likely make a large amount of money in coming years across a few trades when market breaks. no liquidity problems now, but could perhaps could see lower yields when account hits around 20 million
• 3 minutes 40 seconds: has to be very certain a strategy will be safe before putting live because "there is so much money at play"
• 4 minutes 10 seconds: when a strategy works with backtesting without much change or curve fitting it is usually a very good sign
• 4 minutes 28 seconds: IG platform allegedly blocked API usage of test algorithm because new test algo made about 22,000 requests. suggests new algo when it goes live could make about 5,000 GBP in rebate per day using automated HFT algo.
• 6 minutes 45 seconds: will keep grinding away at VIX. over next 6 months there will be another new strategy added to the mix & another strategy over the subsequent 6 months
• 7 minutes 40 seconds: likes mean reverting trades & trades which can be hedged, likes trades where you can make large returns with low amounts of movement and low amounts of risk. likes to have a little and often approach. if it is little and often it is extremely low risk. you know, no home runs.
• 8 minutes 50 seconds: gives new HFT algo probability of going live over following 3 months like a 30% probability because wants to test extensively and make sure there is no problem with it
• 9 minutes 15 seconds: really thinks he can do 100 million over next 3 to 4 years
• 10 minutes 10 seconds: thinks returns are perhaps a bit below 1% a day
• 10 minutes 45 seconds: wants to keep diversifying so he can make the little from little and often even more little to further reduce risk
• 11 minutes 0 seconds: philosophy is PPC - protect precious capital & ARR - always reducing risk
• 11 minutes 20 seconds: if he had 10 strategies which worked like the VIX then rather than taking a 1% risk on a trade he'd take 1/10th of a percent risk on each trade
• 12 minutes 0 seconds: sees smooth progress up to 25 million point and has a bit of anxiety about how he will handle the plateauing when the account grows to that size. return rate likely to drop 1/10th of a percent every few million beyond that point

A version of this video is available for download at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zj1n7iji3otd6nr/video%2012%202016%20may%2027.mp4?dl=0

Video Transcript

00:00 Christopher Angus: Hello Mr A. Excuse me. Just a quick video. Nothing really to see today so the screen's black. You can just listen. Obviously, I was waiting for Yellin to speak so we can get some action. I guess first thing I wanna say is, if the volatility remains very, very, very low like this, I'll have to change the strategy a little bit and basically trade for straight out rebate. Obviously, you won't make as much but you'll probably won't have many days where we don't make anything. It's not a strategy I do out of preference, but if there's no break and she doesn't want to raise, we'll get something today for sure. But if there's no... If the market just keeps grinding higher and higher, the VIX is gonna keep grinding lower, daily take's gonna be lower and I will have to take a much more aggressive strategy and basically go for one or two ticks per trade, but multiple trades, and basically earn through the rebate. There's a million ways to make a million dollars and this is just another way. But if she does raise, and she will raise soon, before September, well, hopefully it'll be June, and the VIX will pop and we'll make some money. That's that.

01:33 Christopher Angus: I just wanted discuss, obviously, the future as well with the plateauing of the earnings, and the next couple of years is the way I see them. Obviously, we're both expecting, at some point, a market breakdown of the S&P and the markets in general at some point, at least in some kind of small scale, even a pop of 20 points in the VIX would be incredible. So that's highly likely to happen. So, over the next couple of years I expect that we'll have one or two pops which will be great, whether they are 60 points or 20 points or 30 points, I don't know. And once they go up, we ride them down, it's always highly volatile so it's good both ways. So if I had to say in the next two years, we'll probably make probably a very, very large amount of money over just a few trades. Also, obviously, we don't have any liquidity problems at the moment and I only really foresee stuff happening once we kinda get to the 20 million, not, maybe not, maybe a little bit higher, but somewhere around that mark, the yields will fall incrementally.

02:57 Christopher Angus: So from, like say... Let's just call it simple. I know that you're not making this kind of money at the moment but, say we're doing 1% a day, at 20 million we might expect to make like 0.9 and at 25 0.8, at 30 0.7, and so on, until it gets quite low. At the same time though, I am working on other strategies all the time. I wanna diversify anyway to make money in other directions with other strategies, so there's more consistent money and it's not we're all relying on one horse. And I have many strategies that I've made, but I need to be very, very sure of it, because there's so much money at play, that it's gonna be reliant and consistent, and even if it doesn't make as much as the VIX, it runs on the side as well. So I'm working on something at the moment. Like I said, it's showing a tremendous amount of promise. And usually, when things work quite quickly and you don't have to tweak them and stuff, you don't have to do too many changes to the overall strategy to make it work over many time periods and when you back test it, you're not curve fitting, it just works. It's usually a really good sign.

04:22 Christopher Angus: So I'm running a high frequency strategy at the moment. Ran into some problems, on the demo obviously, with IG today actually, because we made like 22,000 requests and they blocked us, so that was pre-market. Obviously, it's when you try it out, because you can't be blocked during market hours because that's kind of a disaster 'cause it takes a little while for them to unlock you when you promise not to DDOS them again. So that's showing a lot of promise and that would make a very consistent amount of money, because I can forecast basically how many trades we'll do in a day. Obviously, it will go up and down, but on average, say we do 500 trades a day, I can then say, "Okay, we'll make like five grand a day just in rebate, very consistent money." And times that by 220, 250 days a year, 'cause it's totally automated, I guess that's, I don't know, 1.25 million off the top of my head. Something close to that. And that's just the straight up rebate.

05:34 Christopher Angus: So I guess if I have to sum this video up, it's obviously the VIX is good, we'll continue to grind away money, maybe a little inconsistently if the volatility remains low. If nothing happens today... Well, we'll make money today, that's for sure. But if she doesn't raise today, next week we'll... It's Memorial week as well, so it's going to be very quiet, but say, come Tuesday, if the VIX isn't coming back up, we'll have to go really to almost a rebate only strategy, just while we wait for the volatility to pick up. So we're looking for zero profit really, or one tick. And that works, you know, I've done it before. And it's a little easier, I guess, but it just doesn't pay that well. But, if we're making one or two ticks a day equivalent, why not? But I don't want to mix up what I'm doing trying to actually play for three or four or 10 ticks a day, when we don't need to. Just do rebate only, because it's a different animal entirely. So that's Tuesday's plan.

06:48 Christopher Angus: And again, to summarize, over the next couple of years, we'll have a few big days. We'll continue grinding the VIX. And over the next six months, I guess, we'll have at least one new strategy come to fruition. And then the six months after that, another strategy comes to fruition. It's very hard to predict how much they'll pay. But it's all gearing up for when we start plateauing at like around the 20 to 25 million mark, and the yields start to drop quite quickly. So I think it's gonna be a good run upto that point. And I have to really get on and keep working my strategies until then, because once it gets to 20 million, and... It's easy to make money with relatively lower amounts of money. It's much more difficult to make money when you have large amounts of money. So I have my... The characteristic trades I like. I like mean reversing trades. I like trades that you can hedge. I like trades where you can make large amounts of money, with small amounts of movement, with very low amounts of risk. Don't we all?

08:00 Christopher Angus: So, I think, as well, is I like to have the little and often approach, which leads you to the large amounts of money off the small amount of movement, because if it's little and often the risk is always extremely low; no home runs. And that's why we're trialling this HFT strategy. It's really not characteristically HFT that'll make 100,000 trades today. This is more like 1000, but I mean, you couldn't do it manually. It's just too much, 'cause you've got to manage them as well. So, it looks hopeful, but what's the probability of it coming to fruition, in the the next three months? I don't know, maybe like 30-40%, because at some point, we may discover some problem while we're testing it, and I guess that's the point in testing.

08:58 Christopher Angus: But really, to make a summary, or the summary, it's the VIX will continue to go. We'll have a few home runs, or at least one, I'm sure of it, and we will... I'll continue to find new strategies. So, to mitigate some of the plateau later on, like I said on Telegram last night, I really think that I can do 100 million in the next like three to four years. And I think I'd rather go for that kind of number.

09:28 Christopher Angus: And if you want to cash out at that point, no, because you don't see any point in having any more money 'cause there probably won't be, then, no harm done. And I wasn't misunderstanding you yesterday. I know you don't want to cash out now and you want to cash out some of your other stuff. But I was saying, of course, at that point in two or three years, when I'm saying "Okay, we've got to 50. I want to keep going." You might want to say well, "I'm kind of done or done to some degree." So, that's my plan for now. Everything seems to be working. It's just, I guess, going to my plan, it's a little slow because of volatility at the moment. But I think on average, if I average it out, probably is close to 1% a day, maybe a little bit lower, it's just when volatility is like this, it's horrible. But I think, once... After the first raise, the first announcement of the raise, you're gonna be banging out 1 and 2% every single day; every single day. And that'll make up for the slow days.

10:27 Christopher Angus: So that's my plan for the future, which isn't really that exciting. There's no grand things here. It's just more of the same and bigger amounts of money, with more trades, but still not changing the fundamental ethos of little and often. And that's really why I want to diversify because then I can make the little even more little and lower the risk even more. As I said to you before, my two philosophies are; PPC, protect precious capital, and always reducing risk; ARR. Those are the two philosophies I live by. So I'm always trying to make the trade smaller. Always thinking about stuff that I can do, because for example, if I had 10 strategies equivalent of the VIX, then instead of taking 1% risk on a trade, I'd take one 10th of a percent risk on each trade, which is obviously much better.

11:40 Christopher Angus: And so, that's what I'm striving for. And finding the new strategies is fun. It's frustrating and disappointing when they don't work, but I have a very high degree of confidence that we will get where we wanna go, and we'll achieve it in the kind of timeframes that we wanna achieve it. But of course I do have a small amount of anxiety when it comes to around to the $25 million point, the pound point. How are we going to mitigate the plateauing, and how severe is it gonna be? I think it's probably gonna be like 0.1% every few million; every two and a half to 5 million and the curve will flatten until it... It's never gonna go flat, but it may go down to, like say a quarter of a percent. And that last stretch might take a while. I think it'll probably be the slowest point.

12:42 Christopher Angus: But, if I have a bunch of other strategies grinding out 0.1% a day, and I have by that time four or five of them, plus maybe at the say 35 million point, pound point, I'm at likes 0.3, and I have three or four other things grinding out 0.1, we're not that far off where we are now. So, that's kind of the plan. It's not, as I said, it's not the blow your head off plan. It's just more bricks building the house. And as the one bricklayer gets tired, we hire new bricklayers to take his place.

13:26 Christopher Angus: So, I guess that's it. I'm gonna wait for the Yellin thing in about hour and a half or so. And I'll let you know how I get on just before the close. I've got Zara this weekend, so I won't be around much straight after the close. I'll just tell you how we did and call it a day. But that's it for now. Thanks A.

Back in the Day...

If you are new to SEO it is hard to appreciate how easy SEO was say 6 to 8 years ago.

Almost everything worked quickly, cheaply, and predictably.

Go back a few years earlier and you could rank a site without even looking at it. :D

Links, links, links.

Meritocracy to Something Different

Back then sharing SEO information acted like a meritocracy. If you had something fantastic to share & it worked great you were rewarded. Sure you gave away some of your competitive advantage by sharing it publicly, but you would get links and mentions and recommendations.

These days most of the best minds in SEO don't blog often. And some of the authors who frequently publish literally everywhere are a series of ghostwriters.

Further, most of the sharing has shifted to channels like Twitter, where the half-life of the share is maybe a couple hours.

Yet if you share something which causes search engineers to change their relevancy algorithms in response the half-life of that algorithm shift can last years or maybe even decades.

Investing Big

These days breaking in can be much harder. I see some sites with over 1,000 high quality links that are 3 or 4 months old which have clearly invested deep into 6 figures which appear to be getting about 80 organic search visitors a month.

From a short enough timeframe it appears nothing works, even if you are using a system which has worked, should work, and is currently working on other existing & trusted projects.

Time delays have an amazing impact on our perceptions and how our reward circuitry is wired.

Most the types of people who have the confidence and knowledge to invest deep into 6 figures on a brand new project aren't creating "how to" SEO information and giving it away free. Doing so would only harm their earnings and lower their competitive advantage.

Derivatives, Amplifications & Omissions

Most of the info created about SEO today is derivative (people who write about SEO but don't practice it) or people overstating the risks and claiming x and y and z don't work, can't work, and will never work.

And then from there you get the derivative amplifications of don't, can't, won't.

And then there are people who read and old blog post about how things were x years ago and write as though everything is still the same.

Measuring the Risks

If you are using lagging knowledge from derivative "experts" to drive strategy you are most likely going to lose money.

• First, if you are investing in conventional wisdom then there is little competitive advantage to that investment.
• Secondly, as techniques become more widespread and widely advocated Google is more likely to step in and punish those who use those strategies.
• It is when the strategy is most widely used and seems safest that both the risk is at its peak while the rewards are de minimus.

With all the misinformation, how do you find out what works?

Testing

You can pay for good advice. But most people don't want to do that, they'd rather lose. ;)

The other option is to do your own testing. Then when you find out somewhere where conventional wisdom is wrong, invest aggressively.

"To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right." - Jeff Bezos

That doesn't mean you should try to go against consensus view everywhere, but wherever you are investing the most it makes sense to invest in something that is either hard for others to do or something others wouldn't consider doing. That is how you stand out & differentiate.

But to do your own testing you need to have a number of sites. If you have one site that means everything to you and you get wildly experimental then the first time one of those tests goes astray you're hosed.

False Positives

And, even if you do nothing wrong, if you don't build up a stash of savings you can still get screwed by a false positive. Even having a connection in Google may not be enough to overcome a false positive.

Cutts said, “Oh yeah, I think you’re ensnared in this update. I see a couple weird things. But sit tight, and in a month or two we’ll re-index you and everything will be fine.” Then like an idiot, I made some changes but just waited and waited. I didn’t want to bother him because he’s kind of a famous person to me and I didn’t want to waste his time. At the time Google paid someone to answer his email. Crazy, right? He just got thousands and thousands of messages a day.

I kept waiting. For a year and a half, I waited. The revenues kept trickling down. It was this long terrible process, losing half overnight but then also roughly 3% a month for a year and a half after. It got to the point where we couldn’t pay our bills. That’s when I reached out again to Matt Cutts, “Things never got better.” He was like, “What, really? I’m sorry.” He looked into it and was like, “Oh yeah, it never reversed. It should have. You were accidentally put in the bad pile.”

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

True Positives

A lot of SEMrush charts look like the following

What happened there?

Well, obviously that site stopped ranking.

But why?

You can't be certain why without doing some investigation. And even then you can never be 100% certain, because you are dealing with a black box.

That said, there are constant shifts in the algorithms across regions and across time.

Paraphrasing quite a bit here, but in this video Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Andrey Lipattsev suggested...

He also explained the hole Google has in their Arabic index, with spam being much more effective there due to there being little useful content to index and rank & Google modeling their ranking algorithms largely based on publishing strategies in the western world. Fixing many of these holes is also less of a priority because they view evolving with mobile friendly, AMP, etc. as being a higher priority. They algorithmically ignore many localized issues & try to clean up some aspects of that manually. But even whoever is winning by the spam stuff at the moment might not only lose due to an algorithm update or manual clean up, but once Google has something great to rank there it will eventually win, displacing some of the older spam on a near permanent basis. The new entrant raises the barrier to entry for the lower-quality stuff that was winning via sketchy means.

Over time the relevancy algorithms shift. As new ingredients get added to the algorithms & old ingredients get used in new ways it doesn't mean that a site which once ranked

• deserved to rank
• will keep on ranking

In fact, sites which don't get a constant stream of effort & investment are more likely to slide than have their rankings sustained.

The above SEMrush chart is for a site which uses the following as their header graphic

When there is literally no competition and the algorithms are weak, something like that can rank.

But if Google looks at how well people respond to what is in the result set, a site as ugly as that is going nowhere fast.

Further, a site like that would struggle to get any quality inbound links or shares.

If nobody reads it then nobody will share it.

The content on the page could be Pulitzer prize level writing and few would take it seriously.

With that design, death is certain in many markets.

Many Ways to Become Outmoded

The above ugly header design with no taste and a really dumb condescending image is one way to lose. But there are also many other ways.

Excessive keyword repetition like the footer with the phrase repeated 100 times.

Excessive focus on monetization to where most visitors quickly bounce back to the search results to click on a different listing.

Ignoring the growing impact of mobile.

Blowing out the content footprint with pagination and tons of lower quality backfill content.

Stale content full of outdated information and broken links.

A lack of investment in new content creation AND promotion.

Aggressive link anchor text combined with low quality links.

Investing in Other Channels

The harder & more expensive Google makes it to enter the search channel the greater incentive there is to spend elsewhere.

Why is Facebook doing so well? In part because Google did the search equivalent to what Yahoo! did with their web portal. The rich diversity in the tail was sacrificed to send users down well worn paths. If Google doesn't want to rank smaller sites, their associated algorithmic biases mean Facebook and Amazon.com rank better, thus perhaps it makes more sense to play on those platforms & get Google traffic as a free throw-in.

Of course aggregate stats are useless and what really matters is what works for your business. Some may find Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest or even long forgotten StumbleUpon as solid traffic drivers. Other sites might do well with an email newsletter and exposure on Twitter.

Each bit of exposure (anywhere) leads to further awareness. Which can in turn bleed into aggregate search performance.

People can't explicitly look for you in a differentiated way unless they are already aware you exist.

Some amount of remarketing can make sense because it helps elevate the perceived status of the site, so long as it is not overdone. However if you are selling a product the customer already bought or you are marketing to marketers there is a good chance such investments will be money wasted while you alienate pas

Years ago people complained about an SEO site being far too aggressive with ad retargeting. And while surfing today I saw that same site running retargeting ads to where you can't scroll down the page enough to have their ad disappear before seeing their ad once again.

If you don't have awareness in channels other than search it is easy to get hit by an algorithm update if you rank in competitive markets, particularly if you managed to do so via some means which is the equivalent of, erm, stuffing the ballot box.

And if you get hit and then immediately run off to do disavows and link removals, and then only market your business in ways that are passively driven & tied to SEO you'll likely stay penalized in a long, long time.

While waiting for an update, you may find you are Waiting for Godot.