It’s true that there may be more customers than domains, esp. if you consider those customers who sign up, but never even register a domain despite paying.
It’s also true that many customers (not all) have multiple domains registered, though not each is a hosted site.
But one thing you can be sure is that a domain lost is at the minimum a loss to them of $15pa for a domain only or a $299 loss for a full site. So the loss of these is significant. But the alarming thing for SBI is the loss of new customers.
You expect ‘churn’ in service businesses. No customer really stays for life, ever. But the outflow of ex-customers hasn’t been matched by the in-flow of new customers.
There could be many reasons for that, not including the inability of SBI to adapt to changing markets: less free money, too much risk, too much work to satisfy Google, a confusing situation, SBI’s confusing messages, … but the real skill of a business is the ability to adapt to changing times.
SBI managed that until now. So what has gone wrong?
Blindsided by BB2?
But the BB2 project just devastated their other stuff, and left them LATE by many months, WAY over budget (delays ALWAYS cost $$$), behind the curve in terms of social development, … and the Google Shenanigans took many forms… SBI doesn’t solve people’s problems as effectively as it used to. Why? Because Google came along and changed the entire nature of the problem. And SBI didn’t notice until swathes of sites were impacted.
One Trick Pony?
SBI used to help you do effective SEO by keeping it real; but Google has now said that almost all SEO is ineffective (huh!) and bad. You shouldn’t worry about that at all. Meaning that SBI’s now solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved, while not providing effective tools to solve the next problem.
And do you know what the next problem will be? Finding tools that give you an edge in a crowded world of SOCIAL signals. Name me ONE tool that SBI has that does that. And that doesn’t include Social boxes…! Every site has one of those now. How does SBI help you navigate that world? Not at all. And don’t look at their SBI facebook page. That is an example of how NOT to do it effectively.
Google IS THE TROJAN HORSE
Worse, SBI still BELIEVES that Google the SE is benign. I don’t. Each and every tool that Google provides you is a trojan horse that is sitting in your back yard, waiting for the dark to come.
- Your analytics provides them with data on every visitor to your site, where they came from, what they look at, how they interact, and where/when they leave your site;
- your adsense provides them with buying insight, your customer dollars, and your advertisers’ audience;
- your sitemap provides them with all the pages on your site;
- your webmaster account provides them with a means to whip your ass and cajole you into doing whatever THEY deem necessary; and
- all with the possible goal of providing YOU with quality traffic? Huh! It’s not a good bargain at all.
- That’s a bundle of items to consider
Not when you consider HOW Google can now use all that information (information that they previously could only guess at) to evaluate your site and millions of others. Now we all know what happens when they mix things up …
Do you really really think they are NOT using your information AGAINST you, when they drop you from their <30 rankings? Of course they are. And that’s our fault because we have bad sites… Not in my book. It’s our fault, because we LET Google do that to us.
You are providing ALL of your information about YOUR visitors TO GOOGLE; and Google no longer wants to share THAT information with you – they’ve locked down the keywords so you no longer know what keywords find what page… REALLY!
But what is WORSE is that SBI treats Google as partner in your business… Google is your COMPETITOR now. Share at your peril!
In short, SBI & Google were (implicitly) partners until Panda & Penguin came along. SBI built good sites and Google sent good traffic. Somewhere along the line, something changed. But SBI didn’t. That is why we are all where we are now.
And still KE believes that Google is SBI’s best partner. But without SBI being able to solve the wobblers that Google has now thrown at them, SBI has no product to sell. That’s a fact.
Kenneth