Catena Media interim CEO admits Google's search update was "hard hitting"

Catena Media interim CEO Pierre Cadena has conceded the recent Google Search updates had impacted the affiliate during what was an underwhelming Q1.

EBITDA dropped drastically 95% year on year (YoY) to €909,000 while revenue also fell 49% YoY to €16m. Additionally, during the first three months of the year, total new depositing customers (NDCs) for the Malta-based affiliate fell 41% from 74,186 last year to 44,077, marking a 44% decrease from Q1 2023.

Cadena bemoaned a “lacklustre execution” behind the declines, but also cited Google’s latest changes regarding search as having a detrimental effect during an analyst call following the publication of the results.

In March of this year, Google announced changes to improve the quality of its search that would come into effect on 5 May. Those changes included addressing so-called “site reputation abuse”.

Google defines this as a website that produces its own original content, but also hosts low-quality content provided by a third party that plans to take advantage of the host site’s strong reputation. 

In turn, the low-quality content can end up ranking highly on search and mislead users who arrived on the host site expecting something different.

Google’s attempt to tackle the issue appears to have been felt by Catena, with interim CEO Cadena ensuring that the affiliate’s relevant teams are hard at work to bounce back.

He said: “These core updates are designed to ensure Google is presenting the most helpful and reliable search results to its users. As a result, Google may change its preference criteria and in doing so, new sites could be placed in top positions for keywords while other sites could fall in terms of visibility and rankings.

“But the updates from November of last year and March of this year were, I would say, particularly hard hitting for our sites. Our SEO and content teams have been working hard to recover and reset, and some products recover faster than others.

“The update in March was accompanied by an announcement from Google around a few things I’ll mention, which was scaled content abuse, which is meant to deal with low-quality unoriginal and automated or automatically generated content,” he added.

Cadena vowed that the company would continue to monitor the impact of the Google changes but made clear that Catena is already seeing improvement when it comes to key SEO metrics.

“So far, we’ve seen general improvement across those metrics, broadly week on week, and we’ve been pleased with that. That said, it’s still very early in our deployment and there’s much more work and enhancement across our product roadmap to do, particularly making sure that the underlying model can induce a variety of content across different sports and output formats,” he noted.

“So, we’ll continue to monitor that along the way and given the fact we’ve been in the business of affiliation, we’re sort of very accustomed to dealing with these Google updates along the way.” 

The last few months have seen plenty of change at Catena, with ex-CEO Michael Daly departing in February, prompting Cadena to take the reins on an interim basis.

His temporary tenure will come to an end on 1 July, when Kindred Group’s US senior vice-president and general manager Manuel Stan takes on the role of CEO after his appointment on 5 March.

Michael Gerrow was named as Catena chief financial officer on 15 April, while Edward Midolo was promoted to chief technology officer last month.