Scott Galloway: Google's Latest Victim

Wikipedia is a loser. The amount of traffic that Google sends to Wikipedia has declined by more than a quarter-billion visits per month in the past three months. Although Google's not commenting, the suspicion is they changed their algorithm to favor brand sites over Wikipedia. In our recent Digital IQ Index: Food, we found that about one in eight brand search terms redirected to Wikipedia for organic search. Clearly someone at Google did the math and figured out that brands would be willing to bid more on key terms. ASOS is thriving. Why? In our Digital IQ Index: Department Stores, we discovered that ASOS dominates search, outperforming traditional competitors in their home markets across 650 keywords. Their secret appears to be getting the basics right: tagging photos, displaying basic search terms systematically on product pages, even using fonts that are easier for Google to crawl. On Instagram, they garner 95% of the top 1,000 posts organically. The company's strategy is raising brand awareness by posting content that consumers like (i.e. dog and food photos) rather than their own apparel. Only one of their top 10 posts features products. The method seems to be paying off, as their stock has risen 36% year on year. Another winner: music streaming. More than one trillion songs were streamed online in the first six months of 2015, double the amount streamed all of 2014. But not every streaming company can be a winner. The loser? Jay-Z's Tidal, which we predicted would be DOA, and it appears to be. Last month, iconic consulting firm McKinsey announced their Digital Quotient, which would be looking at four different dimensions, helping companies better allocate their capital in a digital age. We think this is a great idea! In fact, we liked it so much that we invented it in 2010. It's called the Digital IQ Index. Episode 44