We’ve read a lot of news this year.
Every week, each member of the Rainmaker Digital Services team contributes a list of articles for RainmakerDispatch.com — these include news, how-tos, case studies, and anything else we think is relevant for our audience. The marketing team chooses the top 17 links to go up on the site. Then every month, we select the best of those for our Monthly Dispatch.
It’s safe to say we’ve got a pretty good finger on the pulse of the industry.
There are several topics that we saw constantly crop up through the course of the year. They affect your business and the way you reach your audience. These are the critical stories from 2024 to keep in mind as we cross into the new year.
Google Reinvents Itself
No major tech platform has been as active as Google — for good or ill.
First, after several years of trying to replace third-party cookies on Google Chrome, the search giant backed down, leaving the functionality in its current state. Third-party cookies have a bad reputation among users for their tracking capabilities, but no good anonymized solution has shown up yet. Google’s own Federated Learning of Cohorts program was clunky (and might not have even kept information private). As of right now, there’s no solution that will make Google, regulators, end users and advertisers all happy … so we’re back to the 2023 status quo.
Gmail saw its own share of changes. Google and Yahoo were among the email providers that chose to implement more stringent guidelines on emails, adding DMARC validation as a requirement for senders to cut down on spam.
Google’s antitrust court cases have been big news this year. One U.S. court found that Google held a monopoly over search, violating the Sherman Act. Another lawsuit, focusing on ad tech, is still ongoing. It remains to be seen what the outcome of these cases will be for Google, but in at least one case, the groundwork has been laid for a potential breakup of some of its services.
All of this comes on top of a big year for Google’s search algorithm. Sweeping algorithm and search visibility changes brought widespread panic from smaller content producers. Google called some of the affected businesses to its headquarters for a summit in October, which seems to have only intensified concerns. Site reputation abuse, content quality, helpful content and several other points of emphasis were addressed in multiple Google updates this year … with varying degrees of success.
Google also rolled its AI Overview tool out for searchers this year, marking a further departure from the “10 blue links” model of yesteryear. The search giant is investing boots and budget in AI, and though CEO Sundar Pichai cautioned recently that the “low-hanging fruit is gone,” AI initiatives have been a critical part of the company this year.
AI Hits the Mainstream
ChatGPT launched in 2022 to instant popularity — and it’s stuck around. In fact, it now sits comfortably in the top 10 most visited sites worldwide. Its parent company OpenAI hasn’t been resting on its laurels. This year, OpenAI launched multiple new products, including SearchGPT … and it wasn’t alone.
There are now several AI-powered search engines vying for a piece of the web discovery market. These search engines use a large language model (LLM) in conjunction with a web crawler to create answers to questions from search results instead of serving a list of links to the content. From Google’s AI Overview to SearchGPT to Perplexity, AI search is changing the way we interact with the web.
Image, video and text generation via AI continue to improve as well; the changes now are more iterative than revolutionary, but that’s in some ways a sign that the market is starting to stabilize.
TikTok Matures (and Faces Pressure)
In 2024, TikTok comfortably cemented itself as one of the top content discovery destinations on the web. It’s an outlier; with 1.5 billion monthly active users, it’s the only platform not owned by Alphabet or Meta to crack the 1 billion MAU mark in the western market.
It’s been a while since there was a competitor to the dominance of those two companies — at least one that didn’t get bought out like Instagram. TikTok is so influential that it actually made Facebook, Instagram and YouTube add an entirely new content format for short-form video to compete.
Those short-form videos are often cross-posted in the same format on multiple platforms, including TikTok. But the ease of TikTok’s creation tools and its first mover advantage have made it unusually competitive, with significant barriers to the competition.
As it is the only Chinese-owned app to make it into the top in the West, TikTok has been the subject of a number of court cases meant to force the platform to divest itself from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. This year, a U.S. court ruled that TikTok must be sold by January 19, 2025 or be banned from serving in the American market. ByteDance is appealing to the Supreme Court.
Whether or not TikTok is banned or sold, the influence it’s had on the market is profound and undeniable.
Understand the Present to Know the Future
These three stories have come up over and over again this year — and in some ways, they’ve set an agenda for 2025. Understand the news of 2024 and you’ll be prepared for the next year. And if you need a hand staying up to date, we can help. We post the most important stories for your business on RainmakerDispatch.com each week, and each month we send critical updates out via the Monthly Dispatch. If you haven’t signed up to get the Dispatch in your inbox, don’t miss out. Get it here.
https://rainmakerdigital.com/weekly-dispatch-signup/
Thanks for reading this year, and we’ll see you in 2025.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services