
CCN Is Shutting Down After Google’s June 2019 Core Update - colpabar
https://www.ccn.com/ccn-is-shutting-down-after-googles-june-2019-core-update
======
lacker
This article doesn't really make sense. Yeah, Google changed the algorithm and
dropped traffic to CCN by about 50%. But... according to their own charts,
that just puts them back to where they where about six months ago, in
December!

 _What you need to realize is that we have added more people to the team, both
full-timers and part-timers. We do not want to downsize the team, we do not
want to break the morale of the team._

So you're shutting down CCN instead of laying people off? Just days after a
brief downward blip in traffic? What?

Yeah, it's tough when all your revenue comes from a source is extremely
volatile. Maybe you need to be more conservative in hiring, or maybe you just
have to take some risks and hire aggressively and then let some people go.

Then later in the article:

 _We are shutting down CCN.com. Google has made that choice for us. We are
moving the entire team over to HVY.com to at least try and save modern
journalism the way we see it. HVY Journalists is a news platform made by and
for journalists._

Ah, now it makes sense. They already had this plan to launch an anti-Google
journalism site, HVY. Now maybe they can get some attention to their message,
and promote HVY. Nobody is "shutting down", they are just rebranding to HVY.

~~~
tastroder
Agree that seemed odd. I'm more confused about that site in general, according
to those stats (and alexa rankings seem similar), the site itself looks widely
popular.

Could somebody contextualize their significance? Looking at the homepage just
shows me a bunch of click-bait that I'd honestly not want to see in my search
results, even when searching for something cryptocurrency related. Were they
just good at SEO and focussed on the wrong niche? (edit: typo)

------
untog
> We do not want to downsize the team, we do not want to break the morale of
> the team.

To avoid breaking the morale of the team you're going to... shut down the
entire site?

Lots of things to question here. The site used to get $LESS traffic, then it
got $MORE, now it's back down to $LESS again. When the traffic numbers grew,
were readers sticking around? Did they read a whole article, click to another,
etc? Or did they more or less immediately hit the back button?

If it's the former you should have been trying to engage that audience,
creating mailing lists and such to keep (obviously interested) readers around.
If it's the latter then Google was sending you people that weren't actually
interested in your content, and this is a (painful, but user-first) course
correction.

(as an aside, I know this _isn 't_ the reason, but I would love it if Google
was penalising CCN for showing a "can we send you notifications?" popup the
very second I load the site)

------
driverdan
The best thing I got out of this is that Mercola and Daily Mail have lost
about half of their traffic. Hopefully this severely impacts their financial
viability.

CCN seems to have a lot of clickbait headlines. Maybe this change is cracking
down on clickbait like some of the DM replies suggested. That would also be
great news.

~~~
rchaud
Crypto news and clickbait go hand-in-hand in my experience. Lots of newbies in
the space, most of whom don't know what they're doing, so they're much more
likely to click on sensational headlines.

------
lordnacho
So, suppose Google, before changing the algorithm, ran the new algorithm on
ALL the top 50K websites. And then sent them an expected change calculation.

Webmasters getting a boost would rejoice, sure.

But what exactly would you do as a loser site? It's not like you can change
all your previous content. And it's not really likely that something simple
will get you back to where you were. If it were simple, people would game it
and all search results would be terrible.

Perhaps the thing that matters is Google's hegemony over search. It should be
clear to everyone who relies on search that the algo can just change like
that, and business should be built to be robust to the search ranking.

------
mrguyorama
The only interesting thing about this article is that humble bundle has lost
34% search traffic. I wonder what's going on there?

It's so weird to me that Google has worked so hard to create a big old black
box "algorithm" that I'm willing to be they don't even know what it wants or
does, compared to pagerank from back in the 90s that was thoroughly well
defined in a pretty great research paper. It's such a 180 degree change

------
sct202
Seems like if they were that dependent on Google search results to drive
traffic to them, they might not have been engaging enough to be able to
convert people into becoming regular visitors thru other traffic channels.

------
etchalon
Baseless speculation – if Google is trying to rein in "extremism", even
through an apolitical lens, you're going to wind up hurting center-right sites
more than center-left sites.

------
joebubna
TLDR: they lost 71% of their traffic overnight due to the Google update. They
argue changes that large should have forewarning because people's livelihoods
depend on that traffic and Google has zero transparency on the whole process.

They couldn't get answers about the drop in traffic, so they are giving up on
that site and moving their staff to work on another:

"We are shutting down CCN.com. Google has made that choice for us. We are
moving the entire team over to HVY.com to at least try and save modern
journalism the way we see it. HVY Journalists is a news platform made by and
for journalists."

