Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

Digital marketing is changing quickly, and there are two big reasons behind it.

1. AI
2. Tech company incentives

I’ve talked a lot about the first one, but lately I’m noticing much more of the second.

In short, tech companies are becoming increasingly incentivized to keep users on their site, which is making things a little bit worse for all of us. The implications of this include:

• Google keeping 2/3 of all searchers on their site instead of sending them out to the open web.
• Social networks (with the exception of Bluesky) giving more credit to content that doesn’t include links.
• As a result of both of those, attribution is becoming very tricky. If you do things well you can still get a lot of traffic to your website, but it’s much trickier to determine exactly how those users found you.

Years ago, Charlie Munger shared this exact idea when he said the title of this post:

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”

Tech companies are incentivized to keep users on their sites, and now we’re seeing more and more of the outcome of that incentive. We can’t change how those sites operate, but we can change our mindset and behaviors around it. You should still spend time on social media so people can discover you, but just realize that your actions there will be harder to track than ever. If you do well, people will Google for your company later and that’s the win that you’re really looking for.