Offline Example of Related Content vs. Relevant Content
I'm sure many may have noticed Directv dropped The Weather Channel the other day. The 2 were in dispute over the yearly contract price, and Directv wasn't going to pay what The Weather Channel wanted. Directv cited the fact that many people were using the internet to check the weather, and that The Weather Channels Programming consisted of 40% reality shows.
The Weather Channel just lost the potential to 20 million customers. That has to hurt.
All of The Weather Channels content was in one way or another related to weather. Just Most of the time I know I would want to watch it, in the evenings it was not related to actual weather but a show about some weather event. Most of the time they weren't even showing the weather on the 8's.
Its kind of a lesson to look at and apply to what we do as providers of information ourselves. There is clearly a line that you are within context of your subject, just not so relevant within our targeted subject.
As companies such as Google progress in the technology of determining exactly what it is we have on our pages, and determining the relevance to the subject being searched. They are getting closer to that goal of figuring out the difference between re hashed related content vs. original relevant content.
Examples such as the Directv / The Weather Channel dispute, and falling out I see as becoming more frequent in the world of content providers, not only in offline content providers, but in the world of online content providers as well.
By nature of the business that we on this forum participate in, we are the content, and the Google's of the world are the content providers. I am not going to sit here and say that the end of the world is coming to many of us.
However, if you are to look at affiliate marketing as an example, it is the same content laid out 10,000 times over and over. Google or anyone else at some point could and probably will say Amazon IS Relevant content, everything else is related content. They will only display the Relevant content, leaving related content out in the cold.
I am again in no way saying this will happen, just hypothetically suggesting it could. Looking again at Directv vs. The Weather Channel, that is EXACTLY what happened.
Food for Thought
The Weather Channel just lost the potential to 20 million customers. That has to hurt.
All of The Weather Channels content was in one way or another related to weather. Just Most of the time I know I would want to watch it, in the evenings it was not related to actual weather but a show about some weather event. Most of the time they weren't even showing the weather on the 8's.
Its kind of a lesson to look at and apply to what we do as providers of information ourselves. There is clearly a line that you are within context of your subject, just not so relevant within our targeted subject.
As companies such as Google progress in the technology of determining exactly what it is we have on our pages, and determining the relevance to the subject being searched. They are getting closer to that goal of figuring out the difference between re hashed related content vs. original relevant content.
Examples such as the Directv / The Weather Channel dispute, and falling out I see as becoming more frequent in the world of content providers, not only in offline content providers, but in the world of online content providers as well.
By nature of the business that we on this forum participate in, we are the content, and the Google's of the world are the content providers. I am not going to sit here and say that the end of the world is coming to many of us.
However, if you are to look at affiliate marketing as an example, it is the same content laid out 10,000 times over and over. Google or anyone else at some point could and probably will say Amazon IS Relevant content, everything else is related content. They will only display the Relevant content, leaving related content out in the cold.
I am again in no way saying this will happen, just hypothetically suggesting it could. Looking again at Directv vs. The Weather Channel, that is EXACTLY what happened.
Food for Thought