seo-throwaway
I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a failure of leadership to not have planned for something like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the years. There isn’t much discussion these days about brand integrity or responsibility, especially from the top down. It’s very clearly coming from leadership to pursue growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces they’re told to write/research. It doesn’t help with leadership being, as mentioned before, basically invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even show revenue numbers to the employees).
There’s been other aspects too that contributed. They’ve built up a massive operation in India which offshored a lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their growth paths with the company essentially halted because they decided to hire new people in India to build out teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more. There were headaches last year with hiring where management basically refused to do US hires for most teams because the UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant portion of the existing company was US based. This caused some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so stuff generally began to take longer.
It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership’s stated “growth above all” mindset. I can’t say they’re wrong from a business perspective. Obviously they’re doing extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark people had to try and put together something good. It’s an SEO machine at this point.
I wouldn’t say I’m ratting them out because these partnerships aren’t literally a secret, just that they aren’t widely known and are similarly obfuscated like the relationship with Forbes. Ultimately like I said leadership does everything in a silo and unless you’re high up in the ladder you’re not really getting a say. So probably yeah just felt a bit powerless
The aforementioned companies in the parent comment have partnerships with Marketplace to replicate the Forbes model. I didn’t mean to imply everyone who does this thing is using Marketplace.
The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.
It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.
A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.
We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.
It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.
All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.
That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of the work.