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Comment by easilyBored | Hacker News Reader

"Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms."

Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites.

Answer this: Are you sure that Google updates their search algorithm independent of revenue impact? I remember reading from FTC's investigation that Google kept changing their "independent" SE rater's criteria until it eventually met Google's own goals. You think Singhal didn't know what changes hurt Google's revenue (ad clicks plus sites forced to advertise)?

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Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites

Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business. The second example I have is John Gruber (daringfireball.com). He never sold ads based on the number of active visitors.

He sells one RSS sponsorship at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week. His revenue wasn't affected when he lost half his readership.

> Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business.

You're making the point. It's hard to build an online business without appeasing Google and that they need to is bad for small and fledgling businesses.

It's possible to build an online business without Google, of course. There are usually alternatives to monopolies, just ones that cost a lot more or are much riskier or much lower quality, etc. I don't agree that it's just as easy to build an online business without Google.

Whoever said that building a sucessful business "should be easy"? The two examples I gave John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both one man shops who built businesses based on writing articles that people wanted to read and building a reputation.

In Gruber's case, he built a reputation strong enough that he routinesly gets Apple's SVPs to come on his podcast. He doesn't depend on an ad network. He sells ads directly - one per week.

Ben Thompson built a strong enough following just based on reputation to get over 2000 people to pay him $100 a year for a newsletter.

How "risky" is it to start a blog on the side until you get enough readership to figure out a business model?

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