Q3 of 2014 wasn’t the best showing for Google’s bank account.
Profits in this quarter were down (albeit slightly) from a year earlier, and boy oh boy, are people taking notice!
Digital conversations lit up social media brighter than the view from space of Los Angeles at night.
Is this the beginning of the end for the search engine giant?
What does this mean for me?
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
It’s not the first time in recent history when Google “disappointed” Wall Street. Chances are excellent it won’t be the last. In the tech world, profit evolution — and extinction — are accelerated by a factor of gazillion.
Here today, gone tomorrow are par for the course.
[su_dropcap]S[/su_dropcap]top for a moment and think about how much different your life would be if Google no longer existed.
Would you still have a job?
Would your business still be able to make money?
Would you have to use (gulp!) BING?
One things’s certain in this new world we live in.
Tools come and go (think the Palm Pilot).
Platforms come and go (think MySpace).
It shouldn’t surprise anyone how we search for and share information is changing, too.
Google hitting the fill line in its enormous profit pool is just one of the many signs that no one is immune.
Is Google going to disappear tomorrow?
Not a chance. But it’s softening profits are giving industry experts reason to pause and take a closer look at what’s going on.
[su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap]n a nutshell, here’s what’s happening, and you can bet your Bitcoin there’s plenty more where that came from in the coming year:
[su_quote cite=”Buzzfeed”]Nowadays people are accessing more and more of their content and news via social media as opposed to Google, so when you are trying to reach a larger audience, you may want to consider ‘shareability’ over SEO in a URL.[/su_quote]
What’s happening makes complete sense. Digital natives are overwhelmed as it is. Why add in extra steps to the digital conversation when all it takes is a quick click from inside Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to get your message out there for the world to see?
And in time, that process will change, too.
Hard as it is to fathom from our vantage point today, there will come a day when Google and its social media cousins as we know them now will no longer exist.
Which is why old sayings like “a good offense is the best defense” still do.
via You Won’t Believe How BuzzFeed Gets You to Click on Its Links | Inc.com.
