TGIF. This is the Niche Nugget. A monthly roundup where we bring you SEO and creator news and insights from across the industry.
What happened? What's it all mean? We've got you covered.
Here’s the crispy nuggets we've cooked up you in April 👨🍳:
- Google Stock Rips as Chaos Intensifies
- Is Marques Brownlee inHumane?
- Pieter Levels' TherapistAI Debate
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Lowdown
April has brought a relentless onslaught of Google headlines, some of which continue to roll in as I type...
- Sit-In Protests: Over 50 employees who were "personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity" have now been fired following the April 16 sit-in protests at Google offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California. The protest comes on the heals of Israel's invasion of Gaza and specifically calls attention to Project Nimbus - a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract Israel awarded to Google and Amazon in 2021. Protestors claim the project is giving Israel's military access to the cloud computing infrastructure. Google claims the deal is strictly for civilian purposes only.
- March 2024 Core Update: We are now a shocking 53 days into one of the most distributive updates in Google search history. When will it end? No one knows, but with no meaningful HCU site recoveries to date and a May 5th "site reputation abuse" update inching closer every day, sparks are likely to continue to fly.
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Code Yellow: Journalist Ed Zitron released a bombshell article a few days ago titled "The Man Who Killed Google Search" that's sending shock waves through the SEO industry. TLDR: Emails released as part of a DOJ investigation are used to show how then Head of Search Ben Gomes, came under pressure by then Head of Ads Prabhakar Raghavan to prioritize Google's bottom line over search quality. Raghavan would go on to ultimately replace Gomes in 2020 as the new Head of Search, at which point Zitron claims he "actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money". Google's PR team has since responded calling Zitron's claims "baseless speculation" insisting that "the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads system". As of last night, Zitron has responded to Google's response with even more evidence, accusing Google of "playing semantics". Time to break the popcorn out for this one. 🍿
- California News Links Removed: Lost in the news cycle this month is Google's ongoing short-term test for a small percentage of California users where links to California news websites have been removed from search. The test is a direct response to a pending bill in the California state legislature that would create a “link tax”, requiring Google to pay for connecting Californians to news articles. In case the bill passes, Google wants to understand the potential impact. Lawmakers are calling the test an "abuse of power" and dangerous as it "puts public safety at risk for Californians who depend on the news to keep us informed of life-threatening emergencies and local public safety incidents".
- First-Ever Dividend: Despite all the chaos, Google (Alphabet) just beat expectations for the quarter in sales, profit and advertising. Most notably, Cloud revenue grew a whopping 28% on the back of generative AI tools. As a result, Google announced yesterday a $70 billion stock buyback and their first-ever dividend at 20 cents a share. While many are celebrating the dividend, others believe its a red flag that signifies stalling growth, citing Peter Thiel's 2012 interview. In the interview Thiel expressed concerns around the company's lack of technological innovation stating: "...you invest in Google, because you're betting against technological innovation in search. And it's like a bank that generates enormous cash flows every year, but you can't issue a dividend, because the day you...send it back to people you're admitting that you're no longer a technology company".
Takeaway
In late 2020, CEO Brian Armstrong came out and declared Coinbase a "mission focused company". He went on to offer an exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission and refocused the business...
..and boy did he take some serious sh*t for it.
Despite hit pieces and relentless media attacks, Armstrong stayed the course.
Now, nearly three and half years later, following the sit-in protests earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, is taking a page out of the Coinbase playbook stating:
This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
It's impossible to view this as anything other than a step in the right direction for Google's broken culture - but is it enough?
Google's continued insistence that there is a separation of Search and Ads, despite the mounting evidence brought forward by Zitron and others to the contrary, is a tired game.
As investor Chris Dixon points out in his new book "Read Write Own", Google's attract and extract business model is a fundamental failure of system incentives.
As services gain power they start to exploit their users in pursuit of endless profit and growth. Google is no exception.
And sure, their stock price is on a tear despite all of these issues that continue to mount. But this pursuit of endless growth is leading to an end product that's becoming more and more unusable.
That's not a problem when there is no alternative...
...but as Dixon goes on to suggest, the promise of the future internet is a new system with an incentive structure that takes us from "Don’t be evil" to "Can’t be evil".
MKBHD vs Humane
Lowdown
Tech-enthusiast and Youtuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) recently reviewed the Humane AI pin that aims to be "a phone without a screen"...and all hell broke loose.
MKBHD's Youtube thumbnail reads "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" and a number of prominent startup founders and VCs came out of the woodwork to declare their disapproval.
One of the most shared takes on Twitter came from "Small Bets" owner Daniel Vassallo:
I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers. Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm.
Takeaway
The art of truth telling without outside influence is a dying art - and that's what MKBHD has built his entire brand on.
It's the reason why he's been able to grow his audience base to 18 million subs in the first place.
The Humane team raised over $200 million to date and knowingly took an expensive $700 product to market that had glaring shortcomings.
This isn't a participation trophy sport, its a game of technocapitalism warfare. The Humane Team knows this.
And if MKBHD's single review kills the project - that's capitalism working.
To be clear I think what Humane's attempting to do is dope and I truly hope they succeed.
A good first step would be listening to MKBHD's thoughtful review...
Levels Therapy Chatbot
Lowdown
Nomad List founder and popular individual developer Pieter Levels recently sparked an interesting debate around his new project "TherapistAI.com".
Level's insists the product is only a "life coach" and offers a "reasonable and affordable alternative at $9.99/mo for 24/7 help vs real therapy" that is "very expensive" and "can be $75 - $150 per hour".
Others believe his URL is misleading and that while the concept may be an interesting one, he's wading into very dangerous waters.
Namely, he is dealing with mental health and a potentially very vulnerable population who will be receiving advice from an LLM that he has no control over.
While Level's may not have any legal liability, his moral liability is being questioned.
Takeaway
As a genuine fan of Levels, I admire his range and his ability to go from 0 to 1 with a project.
And while I do think there are some honest and genuine ways a product like this could be helpful to some people, in my mind the risks and the unknowns far outweigh the pursuit of profits.
In a tangential way, this reminds me of the investor's ethical dilema when it comes to investing in weapons companies during wartime...
...best to stay out of it all together.
Memes of the Month 🤣