It’s been a long time coming and now I've finally done it. Last week I built this new website - julianmarch.co.uk. (The third website I’ve built in the last 3 months after blewburyceramics.com and tuscanvacationhome.com.)

I built this one because even in the year 2024, it is more important than ever to take control of your web presence, no matter how big or small your business.

I spent over two decades running media businesses,  and worked through several cycles of the digital revolution in that time. The second dot-com boom of 2006, was when the majority of media organisations really took to the Internet in earnest. And as successive social media platforms gained the ascendancy, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat Instagram, TikTok, there was the continuous tension between going all in on these platforms, motivated by extended reach, and building the web audience.  

The fact is that all businesses, whether multinational or individuals, need to establish and maintain their own web presence, for at least three big reasons:

Be there for every mind-state of your audience

First, if you want to maximise your audience and reach, you need to show up in a variety of situations. those situations are less about the specific platform and much more about the context, intent and mind-state of your audience.

In broad terms, these minds states fit into three buckets:

1. Active seeking

2. Passive browsing

3. Unexpected serendipity

Or to look at it another way,

• Stumble upon

• Search

• Subscribe

And if you were to put these three on a continuum, you would find that, as a consumer moves from 'stumble upon' to 'subscribe', their focus and intent increases.  At the same time, the number of alternative sources competing for their attention falls away.

So, in marketing terms, this is like a journey from awareness through consideration to transaction.

The importance of search, and authority

As a business, you have to be in the mix throughout that funnel. Users can search on any platform nowadays, from TikTok to Amazon, but web search engines are still a massive part of that ecosystem. What’s more, the the part they play is not likely to get any smaller as AI technology develops. That’s because web search is the most open search ecosystem – search within other platforms is by definition confined to that platform – which means that web presents has an increasingly important part to play as the foundation of the models behind AI-powered search.

We must all hope that copyright law catches up with AI technology to ensure that due credit is given to sources in these future models, and those source providers should decide whether their material is used in those models or not.

In any case, the concept of authority in search algorithms is not going to get any less important. Google ascribes authority to original sources which update their sites regularly with content which it think best answers the queries.

If you have ever tried searching for your LinkedIn articles on Google, you will see that they don’t appear high in search results. That’s partly because they sit in a closed ecosystem, and partly because LinkedIn hosts thousands and thousands of articles on all sorts of different topics and therefore is not seen by Google as an authority on any specific topic.

Whereas if your articles are on your own website and you write consistently about the same topics, then you have a much better chance as being seen as an authority on that topic via search engine.

Whose data is it anyway? Answer - yours

It’s your thinking, it’s come out of your brain, and in many cases, it’s your marketable asset. So take ownership of it.

As we discovered at NBC News, as one of the only 10 news organisations in the world to be invited onto Facebook’s instant articles program in 2015. While it gave us increased reach (in fact, it doubled video views) from a commercial perspective, the only people we were helping were Facebook.

It’s perfectly possible to evolve a deeper relationship with your readers and audience on third-party platforms, but ultimately those platforms have the control.

You are at the mercy of someone else’s algorithm. Publishers nowadays are watching for every change in the criteria which govern how their content is surfaced,, and have to react fast to make sure they do not lose audience. At Future Plc, a change in Google algorithm could mean a 25% hit in traffic, so we had to react fast to win back our position.

On third-party platforms, you’re also a bit-part player on a massive field alongside lots of others fighting through the polyphony at best, cacophony at worst, to get traction.

Your aim should be to take your most engaged audience to your own space away from the noise.  It’s only there that you can run the relationship with your audience and customers the way you want it to be.

Let’s face it - deals aren’t done in cocktail parties. They’re done in quiet rooms away from the noise.

So, I am advocating an approach for any business, from one person to multinational, which follows the big organisations in media:

Create for yourself your own, ownable space on the web which is the centre of your digital universe. That is the hub from which you can syndicate your content to as many other third-party platforms as you like. But ultimately, wherever your audience finds you, they should be able to come back to your space.