Normally, I keep my articles on the topics of internet marketing, but because we at Customwave have so many taxi and airport transportation clients, I felt that it’s relevant to write about Uber.

Right now, Uber is severely hurting the taxi industry. Why?

Because of the way Uber hires independent contractors as drivers, they don’t have to pay for the same insurance, permits and other business costs that virtually all taxi companies pay for.

Some people have said that Uber’s rise has come about because of superior technology and the ease of mobile payments, but at the end of the day (and especially in this economy), it comes down to price.

With lower costs, Uber’s prices under cut the other taxi companies.

And Uber’s background checks on the drivers they work with is questionable too. The San Francisco Chronicle details a couple incidents that have happened and how the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles are stepping in for a joint investigation.

To make matters even worse, CNN did a story on how Uber allegedly has hired other independent contractors to sabotage competitors similar to them. CNN reports that these contractors make calls to rival airport transportation companies and cancel them at the last minute. CNN’s numbers say this has been done at least 5,600 times.

My message to taxi companies is hang in there. Uber is not going to be able to get away with what they’re doing forever.

The government is going to have to step in, but not to save the taxi industry. They’re going to step in because if Uber continues to get away with not paying for insurance, permits and other stuff, what’s stopping all the other taxi companies from operating the same way?

That’s why Uber eventually will be forced to play by the rules everyone else does.

If I can point to one thing to show off how important website advertising is and will become, it’s this eMarketer study forecasting that by 2018 digital or internet advertising revenue will surpass TV advertising revenue.

So what can we learn from this?

The goal of the vast majority of TV advertisers is branding and to build awareness. Internet website advertising can achieve the exact same thing, but the cost is tons lower and people are realizing how much of a bigger bang for a buck they get advertising on websites versus TV.

Why is this the case?

The simplistic answer is that website advertising has tons more inventory than TV. By inventory, I mean places to advertise on.

I know there’s tons of TV channels out there. 1,000. Maybe 2,000 tops for the average household that has cable or dish TV.

But think of how many websites there are on the internet. Yeah, a lot more.

And with so, so, so much supply and only a bit of demand, it equals very low cost.

Small business owners especially have a giant opportunity to brand their companies and build awareness in the local like never before. I highly recommend people take advantage of it.

For marketers trying to learn internet marketing, there’s a lot of junk out there. By junk, I mean worthless internet marketing content.

There’s a lot of theories out there that don’t hold up in reality.

There’s a lot of dated and obsolete techniques that don’t work anymore in 2014.

There’s a lot of worthless information that doesn’t bring any value to the table.

It seems like a lot of writers write their articles and their article has no point, it’s just they have a job to do and have to write something. Because there’s not big news every single weekday.

So as a marketer that’s trying to learn about internet marketing, one of the big keys to growing is knowing which articles have actual fruit in them and won’t waste your time.

How can you discern which articles have fruit and which ones don’t?

For me, I don’t read content that claims to have a one size fits all solution. I stay away from content that guarantees something. I stay away from content that claims something is easy. I stay away from content where people are trying to lure you in to sell you a whitepaper. Because the purpose of their content is to sell you something.

I tend to read articles talking about new marketing techniques or how a specific marketing technique can be effective.

And if you’re a beginner, reading lots and lots and lots of “how to” articles can be good in getting a consensus on what most people do and what most don’t.

It’s cloudy at best.

Brightlocal recently put out a study trumpeting that “88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations”.

However, when you look at the actual poll, it’s not as clean cut. It’s not like 88% said, yes I trust online reviews.

In the BrightLocal poll, 32% said they trusted online review if there were multiple positive reviews for the same business. So what happens if a business has only 1 or 2 positive reviews?

Then 30% said they trusted online reviews if they “believed the reviews were authentic”. Ok, soooo, that’s pretty subjective. Unfortunately, there’s no follow up question to these same people asking by percentage, how many online reviews in general are authentic.

Then 26% of people say they believe online reviews for some businesses, but no for others. Lol, that’s hardly a vote of confidence for online reviews.

Then 13% said outright, they do not believe online reviews.

So obviously, there’s lots of fine print caveats to this poll.

My take is that online reviews are not here for the long haul. In a few years, word will get around more and more to the mainstream how many positive reviews and negative reviews are fake and how easy it is to game the system.

I’m under the belief that online reviews will be replaced by “local gurus”. In other words, bloggers that write about various local businesses. They’re already starting to pop up. And I’ve seen studies showing consumers trust individual local experts more than review sites. I think this is the direction we’re heading in.