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Doubting Google and Growth
“In my early years at Moz,” Fishkin said, “[I] viewed Google as this wonderful company that was bringing knowledge and information to all of us.” He thought Google stuck to its unofficial, now-abandoned motto, “Don’t be evil.”

Over the years, though, he grew more critical. He wasn’t alone. Employees leaving the company, too, reported a shift.

“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate,” wrote James Whitaker, a former director of engineering at Google who left the company in 2012. “The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.”

This cultural shift, in Fishkin’s view, corresponded with a change in how Google treated website owners and content creators.

“[For] a long time, the exchange of value there was, I thought, fair. You produce all this content, you do a great job of optimizing it.... And Google will reward you with traffic.”

“They are the free labor on which Google extracts all of its value,” Fishkin said. “And for a long time, the exchange of value there was, I thought, fair. You produce all this content, you do a great job of optimizing it [for Google’s search algorithms].... And Google will reward you with traffic.”

Over the past six or seven years, though, Fishkin said that Google has moved toward more exploitative practices: “Google basically said: ‘Oh, you created that content for us. That’s really nice. You’re a real sucker.’”

Google will sometimes, for instance, display website content directly in the search results page, in boxes called “featured snippets,” so that even highly read more relevant websites see less traffic.

Genius, the lyrics annotation site, has sued Google over the practice, and The Outline reported that it nearly tanked a website called CelebrityNetWorth.com. Fishkin began to question the value of building clients’ reliance on Google, when it could backfire spectacularly.

Around the same time, a new trend was emerging in, or at least near, marketing: growth hacking. First coined in 2010, the term took off among tech startup founders. It was shorthand for budget-friendly, innovative and scalable marketing tactics; often, these involved close collaboration between marketing, product and engineering.

SEO fell under the umbrella of “growth hacking”; it can involve technical tasks like redesigning a site’s architecture and streamlining its URLs as well as content creation.

But Fishkin wasn’t a fan. He saw it as Silicon Valley’s attempt to “masculinize the concept of marketing.” To venture capitalists and founders, growth hacking was about “exploits,” “crushing numbers,” and not doing what expensive, out-of-touch marketers would do.

“I really, really disliked that terminology,” Fishkin said, “and the inherent presumption ... that they were somehow inventing this subculture of marketing.” Sure, new technology had emerged that allowed for new marketing strategies — but it wasn’t a brand new field. “When you look at growth marketing or growth hacking, you kind of stare and say, ‘Boy, that sounds really familiar.’”

Yet growth marketers often position their field as a smarter alternative to marketing — a more efficient, techier version of it that unifies everyone working on a product’s sales funnel around the same measurable goals.

Fishkin doesn’t see it that way. Clearly. Though he’s still chairman of Moz’s board of directors, he’s moved out of SEO and growth marketing to work on a pure, top-of-the-funnel marketing project. SparkToro helps companies connect with their desired audience — not increase their active monthly users, as many growth teams yearn to do.

But why launch SparkToro during a pandemic?

DIVE DEEPER
What Was Growth Hacking?



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The SparkToro interface.