CCN Is Shutting Down After Google’s June 2019 Core Update | Hacker News Reader

CCN Is Shutting Down After Google’s June 2019 Core Update

ccn.com

38 pointscolpabar11 comments

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.

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)

>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.

If all they are onto is rebranding, this article is simply bad messaging for the new brand!

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com