Comment by bemusedthrow75
9 months ago
> It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship.
Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.
They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
> Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
This is the key.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
Google can still kill your site even if you're a word of mouth, pateron, liberapay funded site...
That is by having scammers feed of the keywords of your product and selling shitty bullshit/scams siphoning the people that were told 'word of mouth' yet use browsers like chrome.
Patreon has a similar issue : they've banned some people for political reasons.