Are You Building A Business: Leverage Those 6 Trends

Google, now Alphabet, surfed the incredible growth of the web, extremely well, and it then became itself one of the key nodes of the web we know today.

As a key node, the company today shapes the trends that formed on the web, thus opening up new threats but also new, important opportunities for those who are able to see them.

Some of the trends worth mentioning are:

As Google scaled, it changed drastically as an organization. To prevent phenomena that can negatively impact the Google Business Model and attract unwanted attention by regulators, Google might like and favor stronger brands.

As the reasoning goes that a stronger brand might give more guarantee of quality and fact-checking ability as it can invest more in that.

So as Google scales its ability to fact-check information, publishers who have more resources to do it internally might also be more trustworthy.

New publishing business models are needed

Digital advertising business model no longer sustainable for most online advertisers now reverting back to a subscription, see the NYT business model.

While the subscription business model does work financially, it also might reduce the visibility of the brand, thus opening up opportunities to those able to build an asymmetric business model.

Organic visibility becomes less rewarding and more challenging

At the same time attracting organic traffic has become more complicated and less rewarding, as Google creates new features that cut the visibility of organic listing. Therefore, publishers need to understand those new logics.

Blogging has become a highly competitive industry, and starting up from a wide niche or industry can’t be extremely hard, thus it might make sense to identify microniches.

Google‘s core business (search and discovery) is becoming a walled garden. That requires small businesses to initially give up something that Google wants in exchange for traction.

Then a small business should build a more independent distribution strategy, and brand to prevent too much dependance of Google as core distribution.

Google’s core products are already used by billions of people. Google search engine and YouTube are the most popular sites on earth (at least in the Western World).

As Google transitioned toward becoming a mobile-first and AI-first organization, this makes its products even stickier and engaging for billions of people, thus attracting more eyeballs, for longer time within Google products.

This means that those able to see this opportunity can build valuable small and medium businesses on top of Google. How? Read next.

Just like in the past companies like Booking, TripAdvisor and other platform business models became successful and billion-dollar businesses, thanks to Google sending them an endless stream of qualified traffic.

Now Google operates itself as a super-platform that offers within its walled gardens dozens of platforms (Jobs, E-commerce, Travel, Publishing and more). That threatens the existence of the platforms initially built on top of Google which now have to redefine their value propositions (unless of course, regulators or an antitrust case might define that as abuse of dominant position and stop Google from expanding in those niches).

Thus, while Google sent traffic out to those platforms in the past, it might now retain it within its walls.

If you’re a publisher you might want to look at original content, reporting, in-depth analyses and to invest more and more in becoming the source of the information, rather than a distributor or provider of third-parties content.

If you operate as e-commerce being the retailer, or the manufacturer of that product rather than a distributor might be an advantage as you can leverage on platforms like Google Merchant Center to enhance your distribution.

And more generally building a strong brand, recognized in a smaller space, rather than a traffic center, or aggregator, might be a good entry strategy.

Google has transitioned into an AI-first organization and at this stage, the AI side of the Google business model is open and collaborative.

That means you can leverage those AI tools to build your next startup and make it scale. Beware though, as an AI ecosystem will form and Google might be able to monetize it, the company might close that.

For now, the more immediate monetization for Google is through its Google Cloud Business.

In short, those AI tools follow a freemium-like growth strategy where more people joining might get acquainted also with Google Cloud offering, and for now, Google has to keep pushing more and more if it wants to keep up with Microsoft and Amazon.

This gives you plenty of time to build a valuable company. However, as your startup grows you might want to develop your own AI tools and models, to prevent Google one day to take your business away.