Catena Media, a publicly-traded online gambling information company, issued their Q2 earnings update a couple of weeks ago, saying they have reduced its revenues forecast due to the Google Site reputation abuse policy update.
Catena Media employs 300 people in Malta, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States. It provides tips to gamblers, and profits by selling visitor data to online gambling companies and casinos, according to Wikipedia.
You can read the update over here, which says:
Catena Media plc is today issuing a Q2 earnings update after seeing preliminary financial results for May and having evaluated the recent industry-wide impact of changes in Google's organic search policies that have reduced the effectiveness of some strategic media partnerships.The organic search policy changes relate to a site reputation abuse update by Google that took effect in May and which adversely affects the rankings of sports betting and casino content published by many major news media websites.
The update will reduce revenues and direct costs arising from some of the group’s media partnerships. At the same time, Catena Media has also observed an offsetting effect in the form of higher traffic and organic search rankings for some of its owned and operated brands, as search patterns return to favouring high-quality, relevant content.
Glenn Gabe was the first I saw to notice this:
'Site reputation abuse' in the (gaming) news -> Google search change prompts Catena Media to scrap full-year forecast
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 24, 2024
"The gaming affiliate group expects the change in algorithm to harm the effectiveness of some media partnerships."
"It said that changes to the organic search… pic.twitter.com/0KyQgFOzxs
So I waited, to see what impact this had on their stock price since June 20th, the date of this earnings announcement. Well, if you look, it seems like it didn't have that much of an impact:
Keep in mind, the site reputation policy is still only manual actions and has not been incorporated into the Google Search algorithms in an automated fashion.
It is weird, I often see sites hurt bad by Google Search updates but it often (not always but often) has zero impact on the company's stock price...
Forum discussion at X.
