Gating, or requiring a prospect to fill out a form before receiving valuable content, is touted as a way for the company to control the journey. Once the company knows who the prospect is, they can interact with the prospect more meaningfully. The company can’t do that if the content is downloaded by unknown prospects.
There’s only one problem with gating:
Gating introduces friction.
And even if you avoid long fill-in forms for your gating activity, it’s still a hurdle that your prospects have to cross. And they may not want to do it.
Let me give you an example: Assume you want to know all about Bredemarket.
So I provide a 20 page brochure entitled “All About Bredemarket.” But before you can download that brochure, you have to provide your name, email address, and anticipated purchase date.
Meanwhile, my fierce competitor offers a 20 page brochure entitled “The Truth About Bredemarket.” But my competitor is unfortunately intelligennt and offers the brochure to anyone who wants it, without requiring a scrap of information.
If you’re a prospect and don’t know what you want to do, which of these two brochures will you acquire first?
The one that’s easiest to get, which is my fierce competitor’s brochure.
In this case, this means that my competitor will shape the message about Bredemarket, not me. And I don’t think my competitor will praise me as the best product marketing consultant.
A biometric expert (I’m not the only one) was challenged to find a picture of a particular cartoon character in a particular setting, but was worried about copyright infringement.
I suggested that the expert substitute some other character in place of the copyrighted cartoon character.
I can’t share the particular example above, but the picture in this post illustrates the point. You subconsciously know which characters are being referenced, but the substitute characters (pre-copyright days) take care of the copyright issue.
As long as the rest of the image doesn’t infringe on copyright either. MLB may visit me, even if “the fruit company” doesn’t.
Admittedly a lot of content, especially for a non-working day. (One was scheduled.) But if your technology firm lacks marketing content, I know a guy – https://bredemarket.com/mark/
If you ignore what Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye et al said about the validity of 12 fingerprint minutiae points in their 2013 study (cited in phys.org), their conclusions about cell phone locations deserve consideration.
“By analyzing 15 months of cell phone mobility data from 1.5 million people, researchers have found that only four spatio-temporal points (an individual’s approximate whereabouts at the approximate time when they’re using their cell phone) are all that’s needed to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”
Why?
“[T]he researchers’ data shows that just four spatio-temporal points are needed to uniquely identify the mobility trace of an individual. In other words, it’s not likely that someone else will be in the same locations as you are at four different times of day.”
And once you perform multi-factor authentication by combining geolocation with another factor, such as an address or a social media post, privacy disappears.
I had heard that Corona’s Monster Beverage had purchased Thrifty Ice Cream as part of the Rite Aid bankruptcy proceedings, but wanted to confirm this. And the news was partially correct.
Not Monster Beverage, but a separate corporate entity known as Hilrod Holdings.
“Hilrod Holdings is linked to Hilton Schlosberg and Rodney Sacks, who until recently were co-CEOs at the energy drink company Monster Beverage Corporation. Sacks stepped down from his position as co-CEO in mid-June.”
Monster Beverage is primarily known for Monster Energy drinks, and used to be the original owner of Hansen’s non-energy drink (sold to Coca-Cola who then axed it).
Sacks, 75, is now Chairman at Monster, so both Schlosberg and Sacks are still connected with Monster while simultaneously running Hilrod. Not that ice cream directly competes with energy drinks, but the Hilrod hobby could raise some eyebrows.
Matthew Prince of Cloudflare recently described an alleged imbalance affecting content creators, and what Cloudflare and others are doing about it. It turns out that today’s AI web crawlers behave differently than yesterday’s search web crawlers.
The revolution
Prince began his article by describing a win-win deal facilitated by a content-gathering company known as Google. Google’s web crawlers would acquire site content, but the content creators would win also.
“The deal that Google made with content creators was simple: let us copy your content for search, and we’ll send you traffic. You, as a content creator, could then derive value from that traffic in one of three ways: running ads against it, selling subscriptions for it, or just getting the pleasure of knowing that someone was consuming your stuff.”
Sounds like a win-win to me.
The new power generation
What Prince didn’t say is that not everyone was thrilled with the arrangement.
Let’s start with Spain, and the relationship between Spanish online publications and Google Noticias (Google News).
Imagen 4.
The publishers thought they were getting the raw end of the deal, since Google would present summaries of the publishers’ content on Google pages, but no one would go to the publishers’ pages. Why bother? Google had shared the important stuff.
“Reacting to a law that requires news sites in Spain to charge for their content, Google shut down its Google News service in the country….The tech company and other news aggregators would face steep fines if they publish headlines and abstracts without paying.”
At the time, I cast this as a battle between the nations and plucky individuals fighting for freedom…ignoring the fact that Google (cited twice below) was more powerful than some nations.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that several nations subsequently banded together to implement GDPR, shifting more power to the governments.
Oh, and the Spanish law was changed to conform with European Union copyright law. As a result, Google Noticias came back online in Spain in 2022, eight years later.
3rdeyegirl (bear with me here)
Back to Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince, who talked about a brand new voracious web crawler that didn’t feel like a win-win. Rather than presenting links to outside content, or summaries of content accompanied by prominent links, AI tools (including Google’s own) would simply present the summaries, burying the links.
“Google itself has changed. While ten years ago they presented a list of links and said that success was getting you off their site as quickly as possible, today they’ve added an answer box and more recently AI Overviews which answer users’ questions without them having to leave Google.com. With the answer box they reported that 75 percent of queries were answered without users leaving Google. With the more recent launch of AI Overviews it’s even higher.”
Imagen 4.
So the new AI-sponsored web crawlers and their implementation effectively serve to keep readers in the walled gardens of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the rest.
Walled gardens again? It’s just human nature. Having to click on a link to go somewhere else causes friction. This very post links to Cloudflare’s article, my old Empoprise-BI blog, and a multitude of other sources. And I bet you won’t click on ANY of those links to view the other content. I know. WordPress tells me.
As Prince himself puts it:
“…increasingly we aren’t consuming originals, we’re consuming derivatives.”
So what’s Cloudflare doing about the AI web crawlers that are sucking information away with little or no return to the content creators?
Blocking them by default.
“That changes today, July 1, what we’re calling Content Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.”
Cloudflare envisions a marketplace in which AI companies will pay creators for high quality content.
However, today’s content creators may face the same challenges that Spanish periodicals faced from 2014 to 2022. They may prevent their content from being ripped off…but no one will ever know because the people who go to ChatGPT will never learn about them.
Because in the end, most people are happy with derived content.
But your hungry people want to hear from you.
If you are a tech marketer who needs help creating content, talk to Bredemarket.
Bredemarket 