On the 16th of October (US Date), the annual Blog Action Day occurred. Blog Action Day is basically a massive digital marketing campaign focused on bloggers creating content to raise awareness and discussion about a particular topic. You sign your blog up to participate and you are then emailed the years theme. This years theme is inequality, so I've decided to join in with the thousands of bloggers and discuss this issue. Though perhaps not in the way you'd expect, given this is a digital marketing focused post it will be a different style of inequality.
So what inequality could there be in the digital marketing world? Well there is one small company which has a little bit of influence on the way digital marketing operates. That company is Google. If I type in "Google's market share" into.. well... Google... it comes up with 67.6%. That's a lot. This issue was recently mentioned by economist Jean Tirole which won him this years Nobel prize for economics. His piece discussed the regulation of monopoly and oligopoly organisations and markets and questioned regulation in the digital industry and if Google operates in a monopolistic fashion.
One way in which this inequality could be quantified is Google's influence with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Marketers pay massive dollar to have their advertisements placed at the top of the google search results but they also spend a huge amount of time and money in optimising their sites and triggers to be in line with the latest SEO. This year Google updated its algorithm to Hummingbird (they do this regularly though this time it was a larger update) and marketers made a huge fuss and it was massive news in the marketing industry. While the update didn't have a large affect on SEO, it made the marketers worried. Instead, it focused on making sure websites that produce relevant and updated content were rewarded.
So why do marketers become so alert and cautious when Google announce an update? Well, whenever someone wants to know something, the general response is "Google it". It has become a verb in everyday language, that's its power along with its market share. Google basically have rules for marketers to abide by so that their website are successful in searches. If marketers don't follow this, then they're left in the digital dust. Google say "jump" and marketers say "how high?". But are Google doing this for the benefit of consumers by making websites accountable for creating better content? Well, normally monopolistic companies don't progress as they have no competition and therefore no reason to; but we all know how progressive Google is. The question is, do they have too much influence on the direction the internet and digital marketing takes?