If you've arranged the flights on the monitor in order of flight time, not destination, requiring me to stop and take out my ticket, you have failed.
If you've hidden the room numbers (or given them fancy names) so that only an employee can find the right spot, you've failed as well.
The label on prescription drugs, the instructions post-doctor visit, the manual for using software or putting together furniture--if we're getting rid of service and turning it into self-service, we owe it to our newly deputized employees (our customers) to give them the tools they need to not need us.
Sure, you need someone in charge of customer service. But you also need someone in charge of service design. Someone responsible for fixing what's broken, not merely apologizing for it again and again.
It's not cheap, but it's way cheaper than answering the phone or annoying the people who pay our bills.
With most of Europe in a nasty recession, and significant parts of it (Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Italy) in an outright economic depression, I wonder why it took so long for the IMF to Reduce Germany GDP Forecast.
Germany's 2013 growth prospects have been cut in half by the International Monetary Fund, as it warned that the outlook for Europe's strongest economy could worsen if a eurozone recovery fails to materialise.
The IMF said falling business investment and the eurozone's ongoing recession, which have hampered German growth, meant the economy would grow by just 0.3pc this year, compared with an April estimate of 0.6pc.
"The uncertainty, mainly surrounding prospects for the euro area and the ongoing recession in the region, have led to declining German exports to the region as well as a sharp pull back in business investment," the IMF said in a report on Monday.
Ridiculous Talk of Uncertainty
Note the ridiculous talk about "uncertainty". What is certain is the IMF is in la-la land, attempting to paint a picture that does not exist.
It is all but 100% certain that a eurozone recovery is not coming, so warning that the outlook for growth "could worsen if a eurozone recovery fails to materialise" is like warning that it might hurt if you are punched in the nose by a professional boxer with full force.
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in May for the first time since November 2012, and the overall economy grew for the 48th consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.
ISM at a Glance
Series Data
Apr Index
Mar Index
Percentage Point Change
Direction
Rate of Change
Trend (Months)
PMI™
49.0
50.1
-1.7
Contracting
From Growing
1
New Orders
48.8
52.3
-3.5
Contracting
From Growing
1
Production
53.5
52.2
+1.3
Contracting
From Growing
1
Employment
50.1
50.2
-0.1
Growing
Slower
44
Supplier Deliveries
48.7
50.9
-2.2
Faster
From Slowing
1
Inventories
49.0
46.5
+2.5
Contracting
Slower
3
Customers' Inventories
46.0
44.5
+1.5
Too Low
Slower
18
Prices
49.5
50.0
-0.5
Decreasing
From Unchanged
1
Backlog of Orders
48.0
53.0
-5.0
Contracting
From Growing
1
Exports
51.0
54.0
-3.0
Growing
Slower
6
Imports
54.5
55.0
-0.5
Growing
Slower
4
Synopsis
Last month I stated "Manufacturing employment has grown for 43 months. I expect that trend to break next month. Production was up but inventories were way lower. The drop in inventories, in conjunction with a big slowdown in employment, is likely a leading indicator of future production. The positive surprise that does not fit into the above assessment is that new orders grew at a faster rate. Next month may be telling. I expect the new order divergence to resolve to the downside as the global economy and the US economy are both slowing."
The consensus estimate was for slower growth, but here we are. Manufacturing is in contraction and the economy continues to weaken. Given the plunge in new orders and backlog of orders, jobs and the overall economy will likely weaken as well. Expect that trend of 48 months of economic growth to break next month.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Nationally, an estimated 45 million Americans suffer from illnesses like depression, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress syndrome. Today, the White House hosted a day-long conference to kick off a national conversation about mental health in the United States. President Obama stressed the importance of a more open dialogue on mental health issues:
"There should be no shame in discussing or seeking help for treatable illnesses that affect too many people that we love. We've got to get rid of that embarrassment; we've got to get rid of that stigma."
As part of the White House’s ongoing series of “We The Geeks” Google+ Hangouts (focused on highlighting science, technology, and innovation topics), we gathered some leaders in space exploration together for a pregame show to the near-miss of asteroid 1998 QE2 on Friday.
President Obama called on Congress to prevent federal student loan rates from doubling on July 1st. Speaking from the Rose Garden, the President asked the students and young people in attendance to speak out in favor of action on college affordability, just as they did in 2012.
In this week’s address, President Obama calls on Congress to act to give every responsible homeowner the chance to save money on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low interest rates, put more Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and fix our broken immigration system, so that we can continue to grow our economy.
Ever since I can remember, I have loved astronomy and science fiction. When I was a kid in the 70s (yes, I'm older than most of you), the space adventure was still something mythical; men were driving the Moon Buggy, Viking 1 and 2 sent the first pictures from Mars; the Pioneer 10 had been just sent to the boundaries of the Solar System with its famous golden plaque (our message in a bottle for those who might receive it); and Carl Sagan was presenting Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on PBS.
Perhaps it is for that passion that when I saw the graphic representation of the Internet for the first time, a question came to mind: what if the visualization of the universe and of the web are more similar than we think?
I know it's a metaphor - one of many - but perhaps it is the most effective among those we have available.
One thing is clear: we should be aware that the universe is not only what we see with our eyes, and there is no one law that commands it; and so it is with the web, and especially with Google.
Gravity, relativity, and quantum theories are some of the laws that govern the universe we know. Physical and mathematical laws that translate into formulas and algorithms, as well as algorithms and graphs, are what govern the Google universe.
In this post, I invite you to put on your astronaut suit and travel with me through the universe of Google on a mission to understand how, perhaps, it works.
Before we go, a space travel needs a soundtrack, always:
Home: Earth
Our site, our Earth. A blue dot in the darkness. Isn't it beautiful seen from space?
Yet Earth is the only one of nine planets in our solar system where life could have evolved to a sentient state. But, if Earth was out of the so-called "habitable zone," life as we know it would not have been possible.
The same is true with our websites; our online homes.
An incorrect navigation architecture and crawlers won't be able to index the whole site. An bad use of robots.txt, of rel="canonical", and of the meta robots tag (or simply, the use of an incorrect design) and important parts of a website will be as invisible as the dark side of the moon.
These incorrect points and countless others especially related to user experience (speed, heavy ad presence, duplicated and thin content, etc.) or to what may correctly explain to crawlers what a page is about (for instance, structured data) are those things that make our website "uninhabitable" in the eyes of the search engines.
These algorithms - we'll refer to them as the "technical graph" for convenience - are what Google uses to determine if a site is habitable, just as scientists measure the presence of oxygen, water, seasons, and many others things when considering if a planet has the ability of hosting life.
A habitable zone is a prerequisite that, without, with we cannot even think to start our journey. This alone should help us understand how technical SEO is and still will be an essential element in our plans as Internet marketers.
Did you know that life on Earth might not have been possible without the Moon? At least, this is what many scientists affirm. But even without going to that extreme, it seems certain that our giant satellite has played a role in the creation of life.
Similarly, in the universe of Google, a site cannot be considered habitable without the influence of a key external factor: the Link Graph.
The Link Graph is the representation of the relation between web pages (Nodes) through links (Edges).
There is an "internal" Link Graph which exists in the connections between pages of the same Pay-Level Domain (domain.com) and Fully Qualified Domain Names (commonly called subdomains, as it is www.domain.com) and an external one, which is based on the connections via backlinks between pages of different domains and that we normally call the "Link Profile."
One of the laws ruling the Link Graph of the Google universe is the PageRank algorithm.
In the PageRank algorithm (explained in the least complicated way possible), a link to a page counts as a vote of support.
The PageRank of a page, then, is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank of all the pages that link to it ( also known as "backlinks").
Therefore, a page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank will, in turn, have a high PageRank. If a page has low-value backlinks or no backlinks at all, then it will have low PageRank or PageRank zero.
Apart from the page level PageRank, there is also a Domain PageRank, which is the aggregate value of all the single PageRanks of the pages of a site. It explains why having a link from a page with low PageRank, but great Domain PageRank can be better than having a link from a page with a relatively better PageRank, but a worse Domain PageRank.
PageRank (which technically is a query-independent ranking model) isn't the only factor that plays a role in the link graph. There is also a second mode of connectivity based-ranking, this time query-dependent has a major role. This mode is based on the HITS algorithm, which declares that a document which points to many others might be a good hub, and a document that many documents point to might be a good authority. Recursively, a document that points to many good authorities might be an even better hub, and similarly a document pointed to by many good hubs might be an even better authority, as Monika Henzinger of Google explained (quote from Search Quality: The Link Graph Theory by Dan Petrovic).
SEOmoz (now Moz) is a good example of a site which responds positively to both algorithms. To PageRank, because it has more than 6 million backlinks from 40,843 unique domain names (OSE data before the migration to Moz.com), and to HINT, because it is both a hub and an authoritative site according to that algorithm.
The problem of PageRank and the HINT Algorithm is that they can be altered artificially using manipulative techniques.
For that reason, a great part of the Google updates' history is the tale of Google fighting the effects of those techniques to keep its mission: presenting only the best results in the SERPs.
One update was assigning a value to a link depending from what section of a web page (header, sidebar, footer, "body") that same link is published
And this is why we have seen changing so many times the so-called ranking factors related to the link profile.
What are the factors related to the Link Graph that are taken into consideration by Google now? No one knows for sure, and SEOs can only reasonably guess through correlation studies.
The latest one was presented by Searchmetrics during the last edition of SMX London in May (and Rand announced Moz is cooking a new edition of their Ranking Factors in time for MozCon). Very few factors presented were directly related to backlinks:
Searchmetrics Ranking Factors - Backlinks
Factor
Spearman Correlation value
Number of backlinks
0.34
% Backlinks with Keywords
0.08 (diminishing value)
% Backlinks rel="nofollow"
0.23 (increasing value)
% Backlinks with Stopword
0.17 (increasing value)
While we wait for the publication of both the complete report by Searchmetrics and the new Ranking Factors study by Moz, here you can find:
Why is it important to know how the Link Graph works? Because even though the power of backlinks in the Link Graph is diminishing, by percentages, it is still the most important factor in the Google algorithm. Knowing how it works and what makes a link graph of a site a good or bad is essential for the success of a site, and Penguin is here to prove it.
It also tells us very clearly how being an hub and/or an authoritative site prizes in the Link Graph, hence we should create and establish strategies aimed at making our sites the best resource and the thought leader in our niche. As you will see, this principle is also at the base of other graphs, which have an influence in shaping the universe of Google, because, yes, the Link Graph is not the only one exercising a force capable of conditioning that universe.
The edge of the solar system: the Social Graph
At the edge of the solar system, at such a distance that the Sun is just a little bigger than the other stars of the firmament, we find the Oort Belt, from which the comets come from.
What we see from so far away is a solar system in which Earth is only a small element, influenced by all the others that orbit the Sun and that affect the nature of our planet.
Similarly in the universe of Google, our site is surrounded by elements that directly or indirectly influence it. And the Social Graph is one of them.
Content is not just shared and endorsed by backlinks. On the contrary; right now, links play a smaller role compared to social media in how things are spread online. Back in 2010, this was quite evident already, so much that I remember Rand Fishkin sharing research at ProSEO London (now Distilled Searchlove) that he did about how social sharing, especially tweets, was slowly but firmly substituting the act of linking out.
We are no longer citing "Linkeratis," but influencers and thought leaders as the most important targets of our SEO outreach actions.
The mathematical visualization of the relations between Internet users via their social profiles (the nodes of the graph) is what we know as Social Graph, a term that was popularized in 2007 by Mark Zuckerberg.
Web pages can also be considered nodes of the Social Graph, thanks to protocols like the Open Graph.
The edges of these social relations can be many things; like a tweet, for instance. And it just so happens that a social share most of the times include a link.
Before answering the question that many of you may be thinking, remember that I am writing about the Google universe and not about social media itself as an inbound marketing channel, even though - being an Inbound Strategist - I consider it essential for the success of a site.
And now the question: does the Social Graph influence how the Google universe works? My answer is: not directly, but indirectly, yes.
The answer is not directly because:
Google doesn't have direct access to all of the Social Graph of any single page/site/profile, as it is partially blinded when looking at it. For instance, take a look at Facebook and Twitter. Google must rely on what the page first allows it to partially crawl and rank (i.e. the Facebook Pages main page) or on what it can discover indirectly with crawling sites like Topsy (in the case of the Twitter statuses).
The Social Graph generated by Google Plus and +1s is still not a fully trustful representation of the main Social Graph.
This means that, even though Google assigns a PageRank value to the social profiles or could somehow understand if a profile is a hub and/or an authority, it cannot consider the information it owns as totally reliable. More over, Google can't definitely understand if a Facebook or Twitter profile is fake or has artificially grown his followers/fan base (and, honestly, it seems having problems in understanding it in its own Google Plus).
Finally, many profiles and brands who actually are big nodes in the Social Graphs are not present in Google Plus, or are not as far active as they are in other social networks.
But the answer can be also a yes, because:
Social signal seems to have a strong role in Freshness, the algorithm of Google that prizes the freshest and popular content for a determined set of queries, which requires the most up to date information sources (i.e.: News);
A correlation between a richer social graph profile of a page and its rankings seems been proved by severalcorrelationstudies conducted over the past two years.
In fact, the more a piece of content is shared socially, the bigger the probabilities are that the content obtains natural links, as visually explained in the short animation here below (red is our site, blue is the sites that link to it, and orange/green are the nodes of the social graph generated by the site). Social Echo has an impact in the Google universe.
It is very easy to understand why social media is important for SEO; the healthier the Social Graph of a site is, the higher the chance that even its Link Graph is. Therefore, that site's visibility in Google search results will be better.
What are the social signals that now have the best correlations in respect to Google rankings?
Marcus Toder of Searchmetrics answered to this question in his previously cited speech at SMX London this year:
Searchmetrics Ranking Factors - Social Signals
Factor
Spearman Correlation value
Google +1
0.36
Facebook Shares
0.32
Facebook Total
0.32
Facebook Comments
0.30
Facebook Likes
0.29
Tweets
0.26
Pinterest
0.25
In the past days, I asked to Steve Lock and James Chant of Linkdex to create for this post the Social Graph (albeit partial) of Rand and Matt McGee with their Mention Graph tool and the result and the result is this:
As kindly James explained to me:
Looking at the Network Analysis, we can see a small section of the SEO community and how they're connected. The circular ‘nodes’ denote the people in the network, the size denoting how influential they are. These can be selected too â€" like Matt McGee in the example â€" to reveal more information about that person, including the domains they link from and to, their social profiles, recent content and more.
The lines show how they’re connected. If an arrow points from @randfish to @richardbaxter then it means Rand influences Richard. Using filters you can start to look for the most influential people and understand the best way to spread your message around the network. This is about being more efficient in your outreach, since lists are no longer the optimal way to understand a network of people.
You can you also tools like Gephi and NodeXL in create and analyze the Social Graph (or the Link Graph).
But we should not look to social media just as a channel for gaining links, but as:
A way to expand the recognition of our site as a hub and authority;
A channel that allows those who are becoming thought leaders the ability to share our knowledge with others - even our competitors - who will respect, search, and cite;
A strategical discipline which helps us become a named entity recognized by Google.
Entity recognition (with citation), knowledge base, personalization, and localization play an essential role in the ecosystem of the universe of Google.
The Dark Matter and Dark Energy: the intangible graphs of the Google universe
The Planck Mission Team has calculated that, accordingly to the standard model of the Big Bang Cosmology, the ordinary matter "we see" accounts for just 4.9% of the total mass of the Universe. All the rest is Dark Matter (26.8%) and Dark Energy (68.3%). Without them, we would not be able the explain the nature of the Universe.
Similarly, when we try to understand how the Google universe works, not all can be explained with the "technical" Link and Social Graphs. In the Google universe, too, there are different kinds of dark matters and a dark energy that influence it.
Entity recognition and Knowledge Base
Google can classify the documents of the web thanks to the Link Graph and, possibly and potentially, the Social Graph. The documents themselves can explain their own nature with what I defined as the "Technical Graph."
Google then fills the vacuum between documents with the information stored in its own Knowledge Base, the dark energy of the Google universe, which is the information repository Google has built and endlessly builds by crawling the web. It is able to access this repository from the same searches done by the users and the "attention graph" generated by them, as it was defined by Bill Slawski in a Twitter conversation we had.
Knowledge Base helps Google with providing answers to how and why the documents are connected and searched, and an understanding of what named entities those same documents cite and are related to.
But...what is a named entity?
The Query Rewriting with Entity Recognition patent by Google define a named entity as something that may refer to anything that can be tagged as being associated with certain documents. Examples of entities may include news sources, stores, such as online stores, product categories, brands or manufacturers, specific product models, condition (e.g., new, used, refurbished, etc.), authors, artists, people, places, and organizations.
How might Entity Recognition work? Justing Briggs (in this post written a year ago, but still incredibly relevant) explained it with a very easy to understand example:
Entity recognition, relationships between entities, and the authority values Google may assign to specific sets of entities (i.e. authors, but also publishers), thanks to a combination of Entity Search, Link Graph, and Social Media metrics, leads to the opportunity of:
Creating content that is not just amazing, but consistently responds to the entity searches users may create.
Creating bonds with entities (both with authors and publishers) Google may consider authoritative over a specific topic or entity categorization.
Relying not just on links, but also on co-citations and co-occurrences.
Co-citations and co-occurrences
Last November, Rand presented a Whiteboard Friday that included three examples of sites which were ranking for very competitive keywords without having really a strong link profile with those keywords as anchor text, or even ranking for a page (the home page, in his example) that was not optimized for the keyword it was ranking for.
The reason was possibly to be found in co-citations and co-occurrences.
Using the graphic representations Haris Basic created for his post on Search Engine Journal about this topic, we can explain co-citation this way:
As we can see, the association of two entities (sites B and C) with no relation in the Link Graph is generated by a site linking to both.
Somehow, this is a syncretic combination of Link Graph and Entity Recognition, and the entity association will have a stronger force as stronger is the value of Site A both as a hub and authority.
Co-occurrences, instead, can be explained this other way:
Co-occurrences assign a query value to the content associated to an Entity by a document. The examples cited by Rand in his Whiteboard Friday seem to fall more into this typology of "dark matter," which is totally independent from the Link Graph.
Do "spam" co-occurrences exist? Yes. But it's probable that co-occurrences by themselves would not be able to consistently influence rankings without a combination of other positive metrics from other graphs. This could be the same as the PageRank and Domain PageRank of a site citing but not linking another, its HINTS values, its Social Graph metrics, and its Entity grade. This combinatory mechanism is something we should always keep in mind, and never consider one factor being the king of all.
Author Graph (better known as AuthorRank)
Among the "dark matter" of the Google universe, there is one item that fits perfectly and complements the ones we have cited before, as it is â€" somehow â€" a specialized extension of the concept of Entity: the Agent Rank.
Agent Rank is described in a patent Google has updated several times after its first publication in 2007, but it was more a loved by patent experts topic than something SEOs were seriously paying attention to… at least until 2011, when Google announced the Authorship program and started acquiring startups like Social Grapple and PostRank, or when the real nature of Google Plus as a profiler tool became more obvious. It was only in that moment that SEOs started inferring and “invented†the concept of AuthorRank, that none better than AJ Kohn was able to define: "AuthorRank means that your reputation as a content creator will influence the ranking of the search results. Not only that but AuthorRank can be used to make the link graph more accurate. AuthorRank combines the web of people with the web of links to create a more savvy view of trust and authority that will be used to rank search results."
Pro tip: We should try to use authorship with well-known and respected personalities within our niche as authors, because not every person causes the same effect, and because â€" in the future â€" the more authoritative the author is, the more authoritative the publisher will be considered.
We must engage with other authors, especially on Google Plus, and use it as a channel through which we can become a trusted source of information and a thought leader (again!). We should start offering the Google Plus Sign In and Google Plus comments options on your site. We should be more active in the G+ Communities.
All these actions already offer a direct and measurable benefit, but they will also help us gaining a competitive advantage whenever AuthorRank becomes an active player in the Google universe. We should take all these actions because they seem to have a reflection in the new search multiverse Google has created, and it will probably be its future: the Knowledge Graph.
Multiverse: the Knowledge Graph
Nothing is as terrifying in space as a black hole. A black hole is a super massive star which collapsed into itself, with such a density that light can't escape it and such a strong gravity pull that it absorbs everything passing its event horizon.
But black holes are usually considered the best candidates for doubling as wormholes, a tunnel that may fold space so to potentially connect very distant parts of it, and also become a connection between two totally different universes.
Entity recognition and Knowledge Base are the foundations of the Knowledge Graph.
Shashi Thakur - the chief of the Knowledge Graph project - defined it as a “now query-less interface†in this illuminating post on Memeburn. Being query-less, the Knowledge Graph pushes information without us asking explicitly for it.
It tries to satisfy our information needs about a topic, offering itself as a guide for a deeper investigation about it and - especially in a mobile environment - reasonably guesses what we are really looking for thanks to the direct knowledge Google has of our geo-location, search history, and even of our Calendar and Gmail content.
In this sense, the Knowledge Graph seems like the answer to the desire Larry Page expressed about making of Google a tool, which would give you answers to things that matter to you -- even when you didn't ask (more here).
How does the Google multiverse of the Knowledge Graph work?
In the Knowledge Graph, based on a technology first developed by Metaweb (now part of Google), Entities are nodes. The edges linking the nodes are the associations they have one each other based on information retrieval.
For instance, the named entity “Renaissance†is linked to people (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, etc.), things (The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, etc.), books (The Prince and others), and so on.
A very recent patent, well explained by Bill Slawski, describes what kind of content can be used in the Knowledge Graph box.
Let’s check some of them visually
The patent cited above affirms that videos and sound bits are also previewed as elements, which can be presented in the Knowledge Graph box.
But where does Google pick up all the information presented in the Knowledge Graph Box?
Open and Linked Data (Wikipedia above all, but not just Wikipedia) and Google's own Knowledge Base. Knowledge Base in particular influences what information is presented both in the the central section of the box and in the carrousel below, and that corresponds to what people search.
However, Google also collects information from the structured data (Schema.org and Open Graph) it crawls. This is quite clear when we have Knowledge Graph boxes with events listed:
You can find more observations and discoveries about the Knowledge Graph in this deck I presented in the last edition of the ISS SMX in London few weeks ago.
The Knowledge Graph (which actually is considered by many SEOs to be a curiosity because it can't be "appropriately" SEOd) is something every Internet marketer should start studying and understanding very well, because it is what Google is going to become.
Adding more complexity
When we look at the stars, we are observing the past. Our position in space, the light years that separate Earth from those stars, and the time their light needs to reach us explain that assumption.
But our observation is also based on our knowledge. For instance, the lines on the Mars surface that Schiapparelli thought were canals maybe created by intelligent form of life, modern astronomy proved weren't canals at all. Similarly in the Google universe, everything we experience is influenced by our geo-location and personalized by our history search, and our knowledge.
Those two conditions are so pervasive and strong right now that it is not so crazy to think that, in the future, everyone will experience a unique search experience completely different from the one of another person, and that the so-called "neutral search" will be the exception - or maybe just the beginning - of our personal voyage in the Google universe.
Conclusion
Sometimes, we have to look at things from far away to really understand them.
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You're probably familiar with the free-rider problem. That's what economists call a situation in which someone benefits from the entire community paying for something without contributing themselves. It becomes a problem when others feel like suckers and then similarly drop out.
Cheating on your taxes is a classic example. You get to ride on the roads and benefit from the civilization that others are paying for. One non-participant won't crash the system, but if it spreads...
Not vaccinating your kids is a similarly selfish act. In an affluent community, a few free-riders probably don't cause much damage because if most kids are vaccinated, the disease won't spread. But, as we've seen in the battle to eradicate polio, when more than a few people don't contribute (in this case, by being vaccinated), we all lose.
Media, though, feels different. In Grand Central there are tall metal cages at the exit from each rail car, designed to collect already read newspapers. It's actually against the law to remove a paper (if you could, the sides are too high) and read it.
I'm sure someone at a newspaper fought hard for this, figuring that everyone should buy their very own paper. The thing is, newspapers don't make much profit on the sale of the paper, they make money selling eyeballs to advertisers. If more and more people read each copy of the paper, the audience would go up, ad rates could rise and they'd actually come out ahead in the long run.
Or consider Wikipedia. Almost everyone who uses Wikipedia (hundreds of millions of people) fails to contribute cash to run it, and they also fail to edit or contribute to the content of the site. At first, this feels wrong. Here's the thing: one more reader costs Wikipedia virtually nothing, and the people who are donating and the people who are editing are doing it precisely because a lot of people read it. If the only people who read it were the people who were contributing, people would stop contributing.
This blog is read mostly by people who have not bought my books. That's generally okay with me because I don't write the blog to sell books, but it's also okay because it turns out that the fact that lots of people read the blog makes my ideas and books more attractive to those that do buy them. Readers know that a better understanding of my ideas might just help them be part of a larger conversation, so the investment and time and money seems a lot less risky.
Or consider the art museum that prohibits photography, ostensibly to keep unpaid guests from seeing what's inside. The thing is, for many people it's more fun to visit a museum filled with famous images, isn't it?
Take a second to reconsider the funnel mindset. A marketer who thinks about the funnel realizes that she needs 100 people in at the top to get ten in the middle to end up with just one paid customer at the bottom. A leaky funnel is a real problem, because it costs a lot of money to keep putting people in at the top. But what if instead of a funnel, we imagine a two-part market? One part is actively participating, supporting and partaking, all because the second part is busy free riding.
There are edge cases everywhere that make the free-rider benefit seem a lot less beneficial. Wholesale piracy, deliberate theft of services--many organizations and business models can't thrive in a world of anonymous taking. On the other hand, once you can get your head (and your heart) around the idea that ideas that spread, win, there are significant opportunities in a digital world where it's easier than ever to help people go for a free ride.
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