Industry News

I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that we now have brain scan research that shows that Zoom fatigue is a real thing:

The brain and heart readings suggested that videoconferencing led to significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, drowsiness, and negative feelings, as well as less attention and engagement, than a face-to-face lecture. The questionnaires also showed the volunteers felt significantly more tired, drowsy, and fed up and less lively, happy, and active from...

20 years ago tomorrow (December 2, 2003), I started this blog aimed at archiving some of the best discussions within the search marketing community...

In his characteristic spicy way Marty Cagan says that if you want to replace product managers that’s fine—but be careful:

If you’re a CEO or GM, you might be thinking that instead of trying to recruit and develop strong, true product managers, maybe you’ll just do like Apple and skip the product managers, and you’ll just take responsibility for value and viability yourself?

If so, it’s critical to understand that the Apple product model depends on exceptionally strong product leaders....

In Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business, Bobby Pinero (CEO of Equals) makes some interesting points about what they’ve learned about freemium pricing models. This point about how user friction is not always a bad thing stood out to me:

In all of our pursuit of getting people into the product, the thing we forgot is that the goal of onboarding is not for people to complete onboarding. It’s not to just get people into the product. The goal of onboarding is for...

I am seeing some signs of some big Google Search ranking volatility and shuffling today. The core update just finished, so Google would say it is not the core update but the reviews update is still rolling out. Or maybe this new ranking volatility is unrelated to any confirmed update - I don't know.

After just under 26 days, the Google November 2023 core update is finally done rolling out. It took almost two weeks longer to roll out than the average core update and rolled out during the huge shopping days on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also overlapping the November 2023 reviews update. So it was a big deal.

Google has announced new structured data for discussion forum and profile page structured data on Google Search, with new markup and also new Search Console reports. Also, with this change, Google updated the Q&A forum structured data. This seems related to the new personalized experience within Google Search, the hidden gems, the follower counts and discussion and forum features.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google Search Console seems to be down right now. If you try to access it, you will get a 500 server error. I suspect Search Console will be back up shortly but right now, if it is down for you, you are not alone.

I like this perspective from Ed Sim on recognizing that you can’t always build yourself into product-market fit…

There is no easy answer for a lack of customer traction, but my one suggestion before you commit to the idea that you are one feature away from success, is to go back to the basics and first ask if this is the right user or customer. If you believe you have that nailed, try multiple messages and keep learning from every interaction. You may have the right product today but for...