By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Independent Publishers helped build the internet. Once we made it great and everyone wanted to hop online, other forces immediately hijacked it, taking advantage of the work done by independents. Independent Publishers have been in a desperate battle for survival ever since, and they’re losing.
Who or what are Independents up against? You’re about to find out.
What Is An Independent Publisher Anyway?
Independent Publishers take many forms. It might be an organization dedicated to testing and reviewing air filters. Or you might find a bunch of guys geeking out over classic video games. It could be a travel guide, a series of fitness tips, a fan site dedicated to the love of pencils, a site filled with DIY home improvement ideas, or a blog that mocks ugly photos of celebrities. It might even be a site with a very silly name like Giant Freakin Robot. The topic doesn’t matter.
An Independent Publisher is a website or group of websites creating content of any type. The site must have a sole owner, and that sole owner must be heavily involved in day-to-day operations. They can’t be part of or connected to a big corporation or conglomerate.
That means no hands-off investors who buy a website and then sit back to rake in the cash while other people do all the work. No golfing salesmen who spend their days hobnobbing and networking to find deals or investors for their “brand.”
That doesn’t mean the site’s owner must do all the work themselves. An Independent Publisher can have no employees or hundreds. The size of the publisher doesn’t matter; what matters is who they’re beholden to and what their intent is.
Intent is key. Are you trying to build a real publication with real readers? Or is this a smash-and-grab to suck up as much traffic and money as fast as you can before you dump the site and start another one? Independent Publishers are in it for the long haul, with the site or sites they own. No churn and burn.
What really makes a publisher an Independent is the ability to come up with their own ideas. An Independent doesn’t use an algorithm to determine everything they publish. They don’t base their business around copycatting what other publishers are doing in a cynical bid to steal their traffic. They aren’t out hunting for the perfect keyword or scheming to set up some way to use parasite SEO to suck people off the internet and into their coffers.
More than anything, being an Independent Publisher means having your own ideas. They and their team (if they have one) should express them in any way they see fit.
The Enemies Of Independent Publishers
Now that you know what they are, you should know that Independent Publishers are disappearing. They’re going out of business by the hundreds, and there’s a reason. They have enemies. This is who those enemies are.
Big Platforms
There was a time when Independent Publishers and the big internet platforms had the same goals and worked in a symbiotic relationship.
When social media first appeared, it was Independent Publishers who promoted it, driving their most loyal readers to sign up for their social pages. Unfortunately, once social media got big enough and had all their readers, they stopped distributing posts by Independents and sent their readers to Big Brand X instead.
Now something similar has happened with Google. I’ve already written a lot about it, if you want to read that go here.
Niche Sites
Calling something a “niche site” was initially meant to indicate that it was an Independent Publisher with a site narrowly focused on one smaller topic. Those days are gone. The term has been co-opted by churn and burn spammers who use “niche site” to cloak themselves in legitimacy. The real niche sites are their victims and should probably stick to calling themselves “Independent Publishers” from now on.
These niche site parasites make their living by stealing ideas from publishers and then flooding the internet with black hat tactics to co-opt their traffic. They create dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tiny generic sites, which they burn out, sucking as much money out of the internet as possible. When one of their sites gets caught, they discard it like a used Kleenex and move on to another.
It’s all done while pretending to be Independent Publishers and niche content creators so they can trick both readers and Google into thinking their niche site is legitimate. It isn’t. They’re destroying the internet using energy and ideas stolen from Independent Publishers.
Big Brands
Niche spammers have created mass confusion as a moneymaking tactic. Big Brands have positioned themselves as the solution to that confusion if only all the platforms would just let them own the entire internet.
I recently wrote a detailed guide explaining how Big Brands work to destroy Independents. Read it and be prepared for their attacks.
The SEO Industry
Search Engine Optimization experts make their living by branding themselves as the Independent Publisher’s best friend. When a Publisher gets in trouble, they’re always there to lend a hand… as long as you’re willing to pay them.
Except they aren’t your friend. Their industry only exists as long as Google is viewed as a level playing field. When people discover it isn’t, they’ll also realize the SEO profession is a scam.
The main job of an SEO is to protect Google’s reputation, their entire business depends on it. Whether they actually help you is irrelevant since all SEOs make clients pay upfront and usually make them sign disclaimers acknowledging that what the SEO does might not help at all.
Does SEO work? There are a few legitimate SEOs assisting local small businesses to figure out how they can get their site listed on Google Maps. These SEOs should be praised if they are genuinely helping your grandma’s local clothing store find customers while charging a very reasonable rate with guaranteed results. But also, your grandma probably could have hired a web developer to set up a WordPress website for her and install a plugin that would do the same thing.
Most SEOs aren’t helping your grandma. Most SEOs are targeting online publishers with scams, ripping them off, and then disparaging those same publishers for getting in the way of Google. Maybe what they do actually mattered a few years ago, but there’s a strong case to be made that, for most websites, SEO no longer exists and Google has adjusted its algorithm to ignore it. SEOs are no better than fortune tellers (some of whom really do believe they can foretell the future) and should probably have the few useful things they do handled by web developers.
If an SEO works on a site and that site increases its traffic, SEOs claim their fixes were responsible.
If an SEO works on a site and it decreases in traffic, they blame the site and walk away.
They have no way to know what helps and what doesn’t. The site recovery they’re taking credit for might have happened without their intervention. Since there are no identical copies of exactly the same site at the same time with all the same conditions, there’s nothing to serve as a control, and so there is no way to test or confirm any of their claims.
GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT has been shadowbanned by Google four times in the past two years. It has now also recovered four times. In all four cases, no changes of any kind were made to this site before recovery.
If an SEO had been hired and made changes, they’d have taken the credit for those four recoveries. How would anyone know the difference?
The SEO industry takes money from Independent Publishers and gives nothing back. They are big platform enablers and usually also the people behind the spammy niche sites I warned you about earlier. They use your data to help Big Brands steal your traffic, your energy, and your ideas. All while pretending to be your best friend.