Private Traffic [July 5, 2022]

The internet stage is more crowded. Attention is more expensive. Making one's voice heard has gotten harder. The good days of cheap Facebook ads are behind us. Turning users into contributors and advocates is a hard-to-crack but high-rewards marketing strategy. Community is the new Moat.

Since the turn of this century, we have invested most heavily in driving traffic to our sites. More visitors means more sales, right? As competition heats up, competitors are driving up the price of paid search ads. They are crowding us off of “page one,” requiring us to redouble our efforts to keep our rankings high. Google, Bing, and Yahoo contro

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After companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent had proven how lucrative China’s internet markets could be, new waves of venture capital and talent began to pour into the industry. Markets were heating up, and the number of Chinese startups was growing exponentially. These startups may have taken inspiration from across the ocean, but their real c

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Now the question is: What will private traffic look like in the U.S.? I don’t know the answer yet because email marketing is still so prevalent. (And, yes, at least it works great.) But I do know that one-way blasts can’t compete with real-time, two-way messaging, especially when Gen Z’s on one end of the conversation.