The digital marketing experts featured for 2004 are Danny Sullivan, Kevin Lee, John Battelle, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz and Bruce Clay.
What changed in digital marketing in 2004
Facebook launched at Harvard in February 2004, still restricted to college students and nowhere near a place brands could market. The bigger digital marketing story that year was Google's August 2004 IPO, which pushed paid search from a niche tactic into mainstream business strategy almost overnight.
6 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Danny Sullivan
Founder, Search Engine Watch
Had been covering the search industry since founding Search Engine Watch in 1996, and was one of the clearest voices explaining what Google's IPO meant for marketers.
With Google suddenly a public company under quarterly scrutiny, his reporting became the place marketers went to understand how the business behind the search box worked.
Also featured in 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2018, 2020 and 2026
- 02
Kevin Lee
Co-founder, Didit
Continued growing Didit and publishing widely read commentary on search engine marketing as the field professionalized.
As paid search moved from experimental to essential following Google's IPO, agencies like Didit that had specialized early were well positioned for the demand that followed.
- 03
John Battelle
Searchblog author; co-founder, Wired
Spent 2004 writing The Search, his book on how Google and its rivals were rebuilding commerce around the query box, and testing its ideas in public on Searchblog. That October he co-produced the first Web 2.0 Conference with O'Reilly Media.
His "database of intentions" idea, that every search records what a person wants at that moment, gave marketers a plain explanation for why paid search converted so well.
- 04
Rand Fishkin
Co-founder, SEOmoz
Started SEOmoz in 2004 with his mother, Gillian Muessig, as a small SEO consultancy and a blog where he published what he was learning about how search engines ranked pages.
Giving away tactics that most SEO firms guarded as trade secrets was an unusual bet at the time. The audience it built became the foundation for the software company Moz grew into.
- 05
Barry Schwartz
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Spent 2004 publishing the first full year of Search Engine Roundtable, which he had launched the previous December to recap the most useful threads from SEO forums each day. He ran it alongside RustyBrick, the New York web development firm he founded.
Google rarely confirmed when its results changed, so a daily record of what practitioners were actually seeing became the closest thing the industry had to a changelog.
- 06
Bruce Clay
Founder, Bruce Clay Inc.
Had run his search marketing agency since 1996, and his Search Engine Relationship Chart mapped which engines supplied results and ads to which. That map mattered in 2004, when Yahoo dropped Google's results in February and switched to its own search technology.
For advertisers trying to work out where their listings actually appeared, the chart turned a tangled syndication market into something a client could follow.
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.
