I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).
This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
Thank you for being here!
In my report on the 16 companies dominating Google, Ziff Davis ranked second overall by traffic, with Google sending their network of sites an estimated 600+ million clicks each month.
That’s not a typo – the estimates are from Semrush – but we do track a lot of sites for them. 58 to be exact.
Some of the most popular sites in their network include:
- AskMen.com (men’s lifestyle)
- IGN.com (gaming)
- Geek.com (tech product reviews)
- Mashable (tech / social media news)
- PCMag.com (tech news and reviews)
Their most trafficked website that we monitor is MayoClinic, but the relationship to Ziff Davis is not black and white and shouldn’t really “count” so I didn’t include it in those bullet points.
My understanding is that they provide all of the advertising on the site (via their subsidiary, Everyday Health Group) but don’t have anything to do with the actual care or content they provide.
On Friday they announced their results for the second quarter of 2023, revealing digital media revenues of $252.8M, a 2.2% decrease compared to Q2 2022. Note that digital media is only part of their income sources, with cybersecurity and martech revenue coming in at $73.2M (a 7.3% decrease YoY).
They ended the quarter with $892.3M in “cash, cash equivalents, and investments”.
Of course, with Detailed being an SEO blog, it was their comments on Google that really caught my attention. Here’s a nice summary from their earnings call:
My first hunch was that they’re saying this to have something positive to say to investors on the call (there were quite a few comments regarding Google and AI) but if they have the numbers to back it up, then it makes sense for them to comment on.
In a separate answer they also revealed that traffic from Google is up not only on the same quarter as last year, but year to date as well.
It should be noted that Ziff Davis have made some acquisitions since last year but none have any significant numbers (that I can see) which would have moved the needle enough for it to matter.
Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah also wanted to stress to investors that while search traffic is important to them, they aren’t completely reliant on it. Traffic to Ziff Davis network sites also comes from social networks, website referrals, email and via various apps they operate.
The reason I set out to start tracking media companies in this way is so I can know exactly what is happening behind the scenes for huge goliaths like Ziff Davis. While revenue is down slightly, it’s great to see search traffic up compared to last year and that they seem to be positive on how AI might impact them going forward.
There’s going to be a lot more to this story as the months and years go on, and I’ll be here to report it.
