Leaving Search Engine Watch
After ten years, I'm leaving Search Engine Watch and almost certainly leaving the Search Engine Strategies conference series as well. My contracts with their owners Incisive Media are expiring, and we've not been able to agree on new ones.
Context & Ripple Effects
Danny Sullivan is ending a ten-year run at Search Engine Watch, with his contracts expiring against owner Incisive Media and no renewal agreed. The same failure to agree almost certainly ends his role in the Search Engine Strategies conference series, though that part of the split is stated as likely rather than confirmed. Earlier in 2006 his writing had already flagged a change of direction, arguing for moving SEO from push to pull — a signal of restlessness ahead of this break.
The stakes are concentrated: Search Engine Watch and SES were the search-marketing industry's shared venue, and Incisive Media now holds the brands while the person most associated with them walks away from both.
First-order effects
- Incisive Media has to run its flagship search title and its SES events without the editorial figure who defined them, absorbing the key-person risk directly into both products.
- Sullivan exits with his personal standing intact and unencumbered, free to publish or speak outside the Incisive umbrella once the contracts lapse.
Second-order effects
- Competing search-trade publishers and event organizers get an opening to court the departing editor and to pitch sponsors and attendees who signed up for SES on the strength of its names.
- SES pricing and programming come under pressure to prove the franchise sells content and access rather than one personality, since the conference exit is still only 'almost certain' rather than settled.
Third-order effects
- If specialist publishers keep losing the individuals their audiences follow, trade-media value migrates from owned titles to personality-led independent outlets, leaving companies like Incisive Media holding brands whose equity sits in people they no longer employ.
- How Incisive backfills the void will test whether search-industry media can be institutionalized at all, or whether it structurally depends on identifiable expert voices.
The trend: Search-industry trade media is testing whether individual expert brands outweigh the corporate titles that host them, as publishers consolidate ownership while their stars stay mobile.