Web3’s Impact on Web2

I’m reading Read Write Own by Chris Dixon which is about blockchain technology and a good refresher on the history of the internet. 

It is getting me thinking about the impact Web3 could have on the industry I work in(search), the skills I’ve built, and the companies I help.  

Similar to what GenAI did in 2023, if it gains steam and becomes reality it’s going to create a bunch of threats and opportunities for the Web2 companies I’ve helped over the last decade. In tandem with the threats and opportunities will also be distractions. 

The more I read the book, the more interesting and powerful Web3 sounds since the power will be in the user’s hands. At the same time, I am curious to see the businesses that emerge in a potentially more popular Web3 world, what Web2 companies do if this trend happens, and if and how it impacts internet search. 

If you don’t want to splurge on the book just yet, this is a podcast episode where Chris covers it some. Another good high level post on Web3 here.

Product Discovery Framework Applied to SEO

A video from 2016 made the rounds amongst the Wayfair SEO Product team this week and I found it very useful. Teresa Torres shares insights into her experience working with Product & Engineering teams as well as defines what product discovery is and how to measure success.

As the discipline of SEO gets intertwined more in product management, there is a lot we can learn from product discovery frameworks. Curious technical and analytical minded SEO practitioners can naturally excel at product discovery because we’ve been doing details of it for years. By that I mean actions such as competitive analysis, keyword research, data analysis, etc.

While we’re naturally good at the details, we flock to solutions for our collaborators. I have found from experience that flocking to solutions is not as effective. What is effective is defining outcomes and problems for teams to discuss, refine, and rally around first. Then diving into solutions & experiments.

See a very simple example below…this can certainly get more complex with other strategic SEO pillars such as internal linking or schema but starting simple is key.

  • Business Objective: Grow our base of new customers
  • SEO Objective: Begin ranking for new keywords tied to priority business topic with a minimum of 2K new pages.
  • SEO Outcome: Drive new customers to site by increasing organic traffic to new pages with new keywords by H2 ’22.
  • SEO Opportunities / Problem(s)
    • Potential new customers are searching Google every day for what we sell. We identified 5K relevant keywords with search demand which we aren’t ranking for.
    • No clear system for programmatically generating new pages.
    • Manual creation would take far too long.
    • Discuss more with your team…..

Stopping here to call out that this is Product Discovery. If you are in an SEO Product Manager role, I recommend trying to frame your idea or project in the context above first prior to going into what we get to below which is known as Product Delivery. This is so important due to the cross-functional nature of an SEO Product Manager. You need to give your team ownership and context of the business objective and problem, then invite them to use their expertise on solutions / experiments.

What I like about this approach too is I hope you can feel less alone on your SEO island where you feel like the only one driving ideas and presenting solutions.

  • Solutions:
    • Consider technology vendor who has an out of the box solution
    • Build scalable system for programmatic page generation
    • Leverage machine learning to pursue a mix of programmatic content creation and manual curation
    • Discuss more with your team…..
  • Experiments:
    • Run 3 month pilot with vendor solution and measure impact.
    • Use GPT-3 machine learning model to produce content for 25-50 pages and gauge if it comes back descriptive and quality enough for customers.
    • Discuss more with your team…..

Creator Economy & Traditional Education

The creator economy is much more vast than online professional learning – but from what I’ve researched so far – I believe it has a chance to disrupt traditional education over the long term. 

Before I dive in here is an article from TechCrunch about Edtech and the creator economy. They list out the startups below in the space. I have also listened to a few of Gum road’s podcast episodes:

Startups:

Podcasts:

Sahil Lavingia – the founder and CEO of Gumroad – offers a course called The Minimalist Entrepreneur ($1500), which got me thinking a lot about how the creator economy might disrupt traditional education.

When I say traditional education, I mean graduate and undergraduate degrees, but I see most creator economy courses disrupting at the graduate level to start.

Some quick benefits for the end consumer looking for education:

Unbundled Offerings: course offerings are unbundled for the learner to choose what they want. They’re not paying for 2 years, 6 semesters, and 18 courses – some of which will be valuable / culminating and some of which will not. Instead, students can zero in on the topics of interest and find learning opportunities. There still will be scenarios where bundling is valuable, especially to those still deciding where to take their professional career (hence why maybe graduate programs are more disrupted than undergraduate assuming most graduate students have a more defined area of interest). 

Social Proof / Credibility: Who is teaching a course I want to take? What is their lecture style? How do they structure the course? These were important questions for me during grad and undergrad since I aimed for making as many courses as possible worth my while. Knowing the teacher, what they do for work can totally eliminate these unknowns and better help students choose the course they take.

The brand power of top tier MBA programs is one aspect that creators can’t compete with – at least not right now. A Harvard MBA carries weight with employers. 

A colleague of mine always says MBA students represent a ‘great applicant pool.’ Maybe employers could partner with creators to hire people who take their courses?

Emeritus is a very interesting Edtech company partnering with universities and enterprise businesses to bring high quality education / courses to individuals.

This will be an interesting trend to follow. I am still very thankful for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I haven’t experienced an online course taught by a creator yet but perhaps some time soon.