How internet publishing is like building a house on an earthquake fault

The thought for the day comes from John Herman, writing in The Awl.

The New Internet Gods Have No Mercy is a short essay, worth reading, inspired by the decline of MetaFilter, “one of the great online communities of the 2000s,” which has recently announced layoffs.

According to a blog post at MetaFilter, “A year and a half ago, we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates.”

Google, likely without giving a thought to MetaFilter, changed its algorithms in its ongoing effort to provide better search results, and MetaFilter took a massive hit to its most popular feature. People lost jobs because of it. Facebook plays a similar role of granter and taker-away of traffic. You can be happily publishing away, enjoying massive page views, and someone writing a few lines of code in Menlo Park of Mountain View can change everything.

As Farrell puts it:

A site that doesn’t care about Facebook will nonetheless come to depend on Facebook, and if Facebook changes how Newsfeed works, or how its app works, a large fraction of total traffic could appear or disappear very quickly.

Of course a website’s fortunes can change overnight. That these fortunes are tied to the whims of a very small group of very large companies, whose interests are only somewhat aligned with those of publishers, however, is sort of new. The publishing opportunity may be bigger today than it’s ever been but the publisher’s role is less glamorous: When did the best sites on the internet, giant and small alike, become anonymous subcontractors to tech companies that operate on entirely different scales? This is new psychological territory, working for publishers within publishers within publishers. The ones at the top barely know you exist!

In other words: Don’t ever get too comfortable. I didn’t say the thought for the day would be a pleasant one.