While Google had yet another great quarter as it reported earnings last night, domainers all know that PPC payout have continued to decline.
While most business and industries have suffered through the great recession of 2008, 2009, 2010 still with no end in sight, some asset classes and industries have done quite well.
Gold, silver and those companies that mine such minerals have done exceptionally well.
Those holding such commodities have seen them continue to rise in value although the overall economy has suffered.
So back to the topic at hand.
Why is Google’s earning growth bad news for domainers?
Most industries that have suffered through the recession are holding on for a recovery.
House builders, retailers, hotels, the travel industry in general, as well as millions of small business owners are all struggling to pay their bills, people are struggling to hold on to their houses, all in hopes that in another month, year or couple of years, unemployment will improve, people will start spending money and business will pick up.
Every other business on earth has what we don’t have which is hope.
What Google’s earning show is that online advertising is doing well.
Judging from Google, business is great.
Income is up.
Revenue is up.
Clicks are up.
Cost per click is up.
But our revenue is down.
So what do we are domainers have to look forward to?
So where is our hope?
What is going to turn the tide and cause our revenue to increase, when Google is already doing so well and our earning are falling?
As Google closed 60 points higher on Friday up to over $600 a share, domainers stock as measured by PPC income is down 90%.
Something isn’t right and we all know it.
The question is:
Is there anything we can do about it?
Mike,
May be you can also ask this question from industry leaders at Traffic: Rick, Frank, Yourself, and other companies that will attend.
So far I don’t know what will be the answer.
Developing is good but problem is 90% of domainer development is focused at content plus ads, and thats where google adsense controls it again. There is NO ESCAPE for domainers.
We need platforms that are direct to advertiser and also includes affiliates etc. There is NO real such platform at the moment.
It is not going to be easy for a domainer to just build such a platform him/herself.
Let’s see if our leaders can really lead or it’s just all the talk 🙂
Development
+ onsite ad sales which could include placement of videos on your site related to an advertiser’s business (challenge here is you need enough traffic to capture an advertiser’s interest)
+lead capture (challenge is having the resources to process & screen leads & then one needs businesses ready & willing to buy those leads)
Mike development is a possible solution but most domainers believe in Superman …
while the Big boys like Google, Facebook etc etc etc
believe they are too small and too weak to go it alone 🙂
“So what do we are domainers have to look forward to?
So where is our hope?”
My hope is domain sales & development (not adsense sites).
Unless you own huge traffic domains (which most people don’t) then parking is not worth the risks associated with doing so IMO.
Google pays a pittance and does’nt take any legal responsibility for the ads it serves up on YOUR domains parking page. (regardless of the keywords you set)
What I don’t understand is why having the parking companies got together with the affiliate companies to provide a hybrid alternative, it would be better for them, better for business owners and a percentage of the actual sales value would be better for domainers…everyone is happy…aprt from Google 🙂
DIVIDE AND CONQUER….
Google ADsense:…… is the”$Aristrocat ”
You: ………………………Are the: “Beggar”
GOOGLE rewards YOU : A PENNY
YOU SAY: “Thank You Kind, Sir”
Get It, Yet?
I do have an idea :
A platform whereby a domainer can add a domain, the domain has a template that allows for selling PPC ads in a vertical order….like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… down the list….just like a parked page or like Google, but with 10, 20, or more vertical ads, if need be. The domainer then sells ads on that domain, but any advertiser can come along and open up an account with the platform provider (“the house”) and place an ad on any domain as well. So both the advertiser can place ads and a salesman (domainer) can place an ads.
So, for example, if I had HalloweenCostumes,com , I could sell three ads today, and maybe while I sleep an advertiser comes along at 3:00 A.M. and places an ad on my site. I then wake up and have four ads from four advertisers on my site.
This platform would show the exact amounts the advertisers are paying, clicks, etc…, viewable to the advertiser, publisher, and platform provider. This is for total transparency for all parties involved.
The platform provider takes 25%, for example, the domainer keeps 75%. With the 75% …… there is enough profit that after a few successful sites being developed then salesmen can be brought aboard, thereby making more for the domainer and the platform provider.
I think this is all very doable, except for the little nagging problem of Google’s PPC patent for search listings. However, that patent has a life of 14 years. It is going to expire, I believe in 2014.
The good news, is that I know someone that has rights to the same type system Google uses because it was written before GoTo was even around back in the 90’s and has legal rights to use it. And, even better news, it may be launched here soon for domainers. A few more kinks have to be worked out, but hopefully soon the industry will see this great system that has been around for over a decade but the industry has never seen.
The template looks just like a Google page, except the PPC ads go straight down the page and make up the content, that is, unless you want to add more content below the ads.
Why reinvent the wheel? Parking domains IS where the money is at, if someone above is not stealing from you.
One HONEST partner would tear a hole in Google/Yahoo/Bing’s parking programs. Domainers would exodus the parking industry for an alternative like this in a heartbeat. The amount of money they could make would be literally up to them and the control they would have would be much greater due to the transparency of the platform
…especially if Google will buy GoDaddy and other big domain/hosting companies…
@Deke
Jolly good show,
DO keep us posted on this progress!
Right now! Our masters have the Key
and we just have the lock …
ANYONE ELSE KNOW HOW TO PICK A LOCK?
If there’s anything to be learned from G’s earnings, it’s that we live in a world so fertile with online advertising dollars, a chimp could profit. There’s a big world full of businesses out there who only now are waking up to the magnitude and relevance of online marketing and in recession-panic, are spending to get their names out in the world.
Where ‘domainers’ go off the rails is in what seems to be a cultural impairment towards work ethic and an unwillingness (or inability) to introduce actual value into their product- both concepts fundamental for any business to succeed.
Why in gods name people who own category killing descriptive generics- with the marketing gravity of a million universes- are complacent with earning pennies, dimes and nickles on parking is beyond me. I’ll give a pass to some mega portfolio holders who’ve developed a workable model out of parking and end-user sales, but even them, their top 5% should be full-scaled. Anything short of this is leaving gobs of money on the table.
The answer to this question isn’t that difficult. Stop letting the middle man dictate your destiny. Owners of truly great descriptive .com names (they know who they are) have the nuclear bomb in their hands, yet are are choosing to fight the battle with the dull (and increasing duller) spear that is parking. Invest time in learning how to develop- or at least, project manage- invest some money in building something users might want to visit and/or buy from. Learn how to *direct* market. Learn how to develop marketing materials and make effective phone calls that offer something someone might want to be a part of, in terms of your website. That simple.
Only to idiots are domians viewed as the virtual equivalent of baseball cards. Winners view them as building lots upon which a successful business can be made. Yes, there are some old-school idiots with great domain names…
Cliff Notes: The ‘domain game’ is over. The winners and losers are settled, the lines have been drawn. Phase 2 has begun. If you own fantastic names that are parked, someone like me is going to come along and kick your ass up around your ears with an inferior domain name offering a superior, relevant user experience. If you don’t believe me, think of the various adult ‘tubes’ that generate piles of cash, while sex.com sits there like an aged prom queen with a herpes blister on her upper lip.
Long ago somebody else suggested a Co-op , it made sense to me then and now…
@ LS Morgan
Without exception
well said with insightful detail ..
However please, be more kind when referring to my wife 🙂
(Quote)
Sits there like an aged prom queen with a herpes blister on her upper lip
(Unquote)
“The art of good business, is being a good middleman”.
Businesses need traffic. You’ve got traffic? Sell it. Don’t leave it to Google to do that part – that’s the bit where the profit is.
Instead of looking at a portfolio of tens of thousands of names and thinking, ‘how do I do this?’ Take one domain, contact anyone paying for Adwords, and sell one of them your traffic. Repeat.
It’s a move from traditional domaining, to traditional business. The latter has been around for millennia. Out of diversity comes the greatest opportunity.
Try goog.ly – simple google search: http://dot-ly.of-cour.se/googly/
the Google fast growth ISN’T a bad news ONLY for domainers but for the entire Web, the IT market and the global economy, since Google (clearly) wants to “eat” EVERYTHING… Web, SE, online ads, mobile OS, browsers, computer OS, games, music, energy, self-driving cars, social networks, emails, app stores, etc. etc. etc. !!!
just read this TC article about the Google plans and risks:
techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/so-what-if-google-does-it/
@LS Morgan……what you are missing in regards parking is that you are judging it based on what you see, which is a bastardized, manipulated system used by Google and Yahoo.
Here is what you see now in almost every parked domain case :
1. A sh*tty parked domain site with mostly irrelevant ads and photos on them.
2. Pennies paid out on primo domains, for multi-dollar type clicks
What I speak of is this, related to a “real” type of domain parking. This is how it really could be :
1. The domainer controls the ads and they are relevant, not mixed with trash arbitrage ads, or ads about bright teeth when you have a domain about power drills. These unrelated ads and low quality traffic mixed in with our great domain traffic is the act of whitewashing of legitimate traffic that the major search engines do.
2. That $15 click for the keywords “Rehab Clinic” in the Google Keyword Tool that you see, for example, is what the advertiser could be paying the domainer if the domainer set the price. Then, of course, 25% to the house, so the domainer takes home $11.25 for that $15 click. Whereas, Google or Yahoo would probably float you .50 to $1.50 in most cases in “old school” domain parking, which is where we are at now.
There’s no reason for parking to be seen as being bad pages, or even looked at as not being “developed”.
Tell me, what is a Google results page? Is that a developed site? It’s no different than any parked page out there, except more relevant b/c that is how Google wants it IMO. They don’t want parked pages to be looked at as high quality, developed sites, which they could be.
Has any thought about the fact that the technology for advertisers has vastly improved over the years. I work at an agency & run campaigns the systems are far more advanced then lets say 5 to 6 years ago.
Before thinking about what you should make per click think about the value for the advertiser & their potential customer.
Don’t think clicks & eyeballs, think about measured ROI or at least measured actions for the advertisers.
We the people who run the ads online via Yahoo & Google know that unfortunately ads on Parked pages have a very bad conversion rate in general. Think honestly when was the last time you purchased something from clicking on a parked page? I do have a domain portfolio & many domains are set up as shopping sites using affiliate ads. I can clearly see the conversion rates. With Parking I can’t see this info & it’s become a standard measurement for advertisers.
While the economy was down branding campaign budgets are usually cut. Google & Yahoo’s content network that supplies the ads for mostly all parking companies are at the best usually used for Branding Campaigns. This is why the PPC revenue has gone down. Also years ago advertisers didn’t have an option about showing ads on Parked pages now they do. Unfortunately this is the first to get clicked off.
There’s no reason for parking to be seen as being bad pages, or even looked at as not being “developed”.
———-
There are dev ‘solutions’ out there (usually ajax based) offering up a user experience that, to Joe Random Surfer, is hardly distinguishable from a full scale etailer. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.
The ‘problem’ with parking isn’t just the landers from the parking services usually suck. Its that no matter how you shake it, your ‘parking destiny’ is liable to the larger cash-cow that directly takes in the money from the advertisers. You can ramp up user experience until it’s semi-decent, but so long as Google decides how much you get paid for those leads, the vise is on your balls and you cannot cry foul when they tighten it up.
To advance parking as a lead gen intermediary is somewhat fair, but direct navigation is often times less filtered for user intent than search (especially with mile-wide keywords). If you have the right kinds of domain names (the real, heavy-hitting, category killing .coms), why park and take pocket change from Google when you can implement dead-simple directory infastrucutre and sell those ads yourself? Pocket the whole damn check, rather than a wee little fragment of it.
Why? Because that takes effort. The reward is immeasurably greater- you are in charge of your own destiny, you make more money- but bending over to pick up dollars seems to be too much effort for some ‘domainers’, so they’d rather sit on their asses and let Google occasionally toss a nickle their way, then cry like morons when they’re not tossing those nickles fast enough.
As usual, domainers can do F all except for whine & b.itch
Some of the solutions here are just fantasy pie-in-the-sky “solutions”.
$15 per click for “rehab clinic” for domain parking?! LOL
If that happens again (seeing $15/click) scammers will reg “cheapassrehabclinic.biz” for $8 and milk advertisers’ budgets dry & ruin it for everyone, when they & all their friends click non stop…
Anyone who has been an advertiser knows that – ON AVERAGE – clicks from domain parking are mostly poor quality and/or fraudulent – usually coming from some piss-poor domain name unrelated to the product/service.
Simple – advertisers can now vote with their feet – and wallets – by turning the source that drains their budgets…
Time for most of you johnny cum lately domainer types to go back to your cubcile jobs or “day trading” or “poker for a living”..
Yo LS
Enough about talking about ppc and knocking domainers.
You spend so much time worrying about domainers, your fat ego and trying smack ricksblog around. He tore you a new ass hole and your not a player. Stop talking as if you know what your talking little boy.
You are so full of shit its amazing. Stick to your shit geo .org names and realize how domains have value and drives the internet.
Manage how your going sell your .co shit and send the com owners a bottle of scotch.
Were not listening to a guy that needs to work under a company and can’t form a website.
Go dump your shit portfolio and get some decent names.
I supposed being my age I did miss out on ‘the golden years’ of making revenue from parked domains and PPC and the other forms of making money from g$$gle so I dont miss anything.
About the only thing that i use google for is simply to search, maps & analytics and other than that I think google are pirates and have nothing to do with them.
Ive never really made money of google or anything worth mentioning from any other service and i treat my domains as a nice bunch of names that hopefully in 10-15 years i can get a return so i know that until then im stuck working 9-5 LOL’s.
About the only thing i could suggest (it will never happen) is that everyone totally move away from google (easier said i know).
im just driven by ‘killer name .com’s and some ccTLDs’ and dont care about the money because it was dead way before i got here and i refine the names that i get to be exact (still many gems in the dirt) im young and im dumbfounded on what i have found with the big boys around.
with tv’s that are internet enabled it might be good rethink on how you park and start integrating shops, and other things into the parked domain and take charge of your own stuff (like the rappers do – they own the studio, record/cd press and distribution) and i dont think the days of ‘money handouts’ will ever come back.
im sure i will get some flack, but hey im young and have time on my side.
bad g$$gle!!!
@ LS Morgan and Aggro ….you guys did not read my first post very well.
LS…..you basically rehashed my words regarding a system that has already been created. What you said is exactly what’s been created already.
I said that the domainer’s would control the payout….not Google…..if there was a fair, independent, transparent domain parking system. “The House” would NOT set the price or the mysterious payout…..it would be transparent for all to see. The domainer set the payout, not the house. Get it?
A domainer could very well set the minimum bid at $15 a click for the keywords “Rehab Clinic”. Now in your example Aggro, cheapassrehabclinic.biz, the domainer could set that price, but he would not get it from any knowledgeable advertiser. But, I bet the domainer that has RehabClinics,com could get that price. Or even CaliforniaRehabClinics.com, or many other similar ones.
And yes, LS Morgan…..all you do is badmouth domainers. I’ve seen it plenty of times. You obviously have a beef of some kind, or are “astroturfing” , of which there is plenty going on in the domain biz by TM laywers, trademark protection groups, etc…. I bet dollars to donuts your one of those.
@Deke great posts good thought provoking ideas
So A sort of Co-operative parking company Joint Venture parking , the difficult bit i see it the
start as there are a few network out there
the thing is how to a, reduce the resistance from ad buyers to try the service and b, having a
meaningful experience for user so they will stay and play or click as the case maybe
the software i would imagine is available at a reasonable cost , so what missing hmm the traffic
Driving traffic to the network is the issues unless you have some yes killer domains to help
kick start the operation.
i will get the software, if you will bring the traffic then everyone is happy
if your serious and would like to follow this through please
contact me Steve@DomainManagement.net
as you are right and it just needs doing
Respect
Google and the Web are already pretty close to kill the printed Press forever, so…
Your hope would be in Microsoft bing getting big and competing with Google over websites to show ads.
But Google always crushed Microsoft into the ground.
Sorry for swimming up stream but I see Google’s profits as a positive. Brick and mortar types (like me) were moving towards search and domains when Facebook and Twitter came along. Now that those new mediums are no longer new but up and running, the journey resumes. Businesses flock to search engines and as they begin to peel back the medium they will learn about domain values. Many, many businesses are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on search with thousands of keywords in their campaigns. They will learn that only a handful of keywords make up 80% of their click thrus and will soon stumble upon the idea of owning the domains which are most searched keywords for their businesses. Darden, a $6BB company, just launched NeverEndingPastaBowl.com which is a good sign. More companies will follow suit with separate keyword sites. But for the cost to build 2 restaurants they could have owned Restaurants.com for life. I predict a drastic increase in 301 re-directs for relevant domains in mainstream media over the next year. The question is, “What is relevant?”
What percentage of Google net profit comes from Domain Parking ?
When you find the answer …you find how relevant or not …”Parking” is to Google.
I have to disagree. Anytime, a company is making tons of money is a good sign. Especially, in this kind of economic environment. Kudos to Google. At least, I know there are golds in them mines. Now, lets go make some money.
Get over parking. It is dead for 99% of domains dying for the rest.
( sorry if I’m repeating some of what has been said before but this is my 2 cents):
…so the problem is the middle man… get rid of it. In the future, no one better than the domain owner to be able to properly manage the advertising income in their properties.
Stop forcing your way into a game you can’t win. Do you honestly believe that this industry will turn around and be “like before”…? (read – stop sitting on your butt waiting for your mediocre domains to make money from ads that users don’t even click on anymore )
Yes, the solution is in developing your domains, and yes the solution is in managing your own advertising and stop letting google or yahoo do that for you. Or any other third party if you ask me.., There is a more work involved – but there is also slot more profit on it.
Domainers own most of the valuable properties out there and these properties properly developed can bring extreme value for advertisers. WAY MORE THAN GOOGLE CAN, from an ROI point of view.
Users are looking for solutions and we own the channels by which those solutions are delivered. Got it? Search engines do nothing but point the finger to a site where the user can find a solution. – Conversion is actually made INSIDE a website.
An advertiser paying $40 a click on google for a search term ie: [i want to save on car insurance], should not have any problems paying $100 a month to have a “premium” listing on a website built on the an exact match domain [iwanttosaveoncarinsurance.com], that is properly built and focused on exclusivity (the premium part of it) and conversion (the design and architecture part of it) . Now, if you manage your way into selling just 10 of these premium listings you could be bringing in $1000 a month for only one domain. ( these are all random numbers but I’m sure you get the point)
These advertisers understand well what it means to buy into keywords. There are already A LOT of businesses that see the value of buying into exclusive rights to advertise on a particular website that converts well. Depending on the industry this exclusivity can represent much better ROI then the PPC game on SE’s.
This means proper development, maintenance AND sales. But if you have the right domains this is the way to go.
The solution – A Premium listing platform focused on conversion that delivers highly qualified leads to advertisers. I’m working on one for the service industry.
The gold rush is OVER. The domain game is OVER. It’s time to get to work.
Whoever “LS small player” is:
If you’re going to troll someone, at least do so by keeping your posts fact-based. You can’t mix imaginary nonsense (pretty much everything you typed) with small dashes of fact (my owning geo.org names) and think that gives you any sort of credibility. And not to be pedant, but the whole your/you’re thing really isn’t that hard and makes you look dumber than an anvil.
Deke:
“And yes, LS Morgan…..all you do is badmouth domainers. I’ve seen it plenty of times. You obviously have a beef of some kind, or are “astroturfing” , of which there is plenty going on in the domain biz by TM laywers, trademark protection groups, etc…. I bet dollars to donuts your one of those.”
A lot of what you consider ‘badmouthing’ is just pointing out fact that everyone outside the ‘domaining bubble’ sees plain as day. As far as your hysterical mental construct about my being some sort of infiltrator, no. I’m not any of those things, so you lose your dollars, I keep my donuts.
There *is* a successful domaining model, but it was a time sensitive thing and isn’t really available anymore- or, whatever opportunities still remain in pure-play domaining are not available to people who aren’t first exceptionally bright and with available capital. The success curve in late-entry domaining no longer breaks at the intellectual halfway point, like it did in the old days where monkeys could profit. It’s now at the top 2%, or whatever, who don’t seem to be sharing their ideas too readily in domainer blog comments.
Domo has it right.
Devel loses to parking because parking works better. There is no other reason. It works. Why change something that’s working?
Why do people *tell other domainers* to develop? Why do they say “all the good names are gone”? (Lots of people do this, no singling any one out.) No successful domainer would say these things. And if you do your homework you’ll find they indeed have not.
GOOG has one site that has enormous traffic.
It’s not “developed” (if I understand correctly what people mean when they say “develop”).
This site that GOOG has is a *simple web form*. The total size of the “home” page on this site: 9344 bytes. Small enough to fit in a *single packet*, avoid fragmentation and survive all manner of MTU restrictions on its way to your Ethernet.
As you submit requests, *text* ads are pulled from a database and included in the returned page, along with cached page results (obtained previously, from *crawling other people’s sites*… thieves! lol.), again delivered in plain old *text* (unless of course the user is using “image search”… incidentally, ask yourself what percentage of total searches are image searches?).
Nearly all of GOOG revenue comes from this one site. What is this site? (If you guessed YouTube, you have much to learn.)
You want to analyse a “successsful website”?
I have just described one to you.
Allow me to repeat: It is *not* “developed” (unless one considers 9344 bytes of HTML, text and some javascript to be “development”).
The “value” of this site is what’s behind it: a crawler that began as a python script, an idea about “site popularity” and aggressive crawling other people’s sites.
Well they were making money off domainers before this quarter so i don’t see why this result for them is any different for domainers, the answer has always been ……develop
@ls Morgan
There is no smart discussion with you and your ego. You will always rant and how your always right
You claim your not a domainer. But yet your on domain blogs and forums
You don’t have my respect little ego boy
Go do something with your life. Countless hours on forums and domain blogs
How many people have you pissed on and created enemies with? The king tore you a new ass hole and domainers can crush you.
I would just shut up and keep talking big game to yourself.
some think (and I agree) that all newspapers are like “dead men walking”…
thenextweb.com/us/2010/10/11/local-newspapers-are-dead-men-walking/
the killer will be the Web and (mainly) the #1 news aggregator: GoogleNews
a. software geeks “develop” sites(1) making them complex and time-consuming to navigate
b. google(2) crawls the sites, reducing them to text and image files, making it easy to search entire sites, by the millions, all at once
c. users either
– search google to find the sites, in the form of text excerpts or image files
or
– type fully qualified domain names of sites(1) into their browsers
if you are an online advertiser trying to reach as many potential consumers as possible, and had to choose one location for display, where would you rather have your ads: at (1) or (2)?
if you are a user, and know about google, how are you going to locate sites of interest?
correction: locate –> locate *and search within*
I think the solution lies in developing a CMS oriented to domainers.
We have taken few steps to develop a domain monetization software.
Check out http://www.socialcms.com
Thanks
Bottom line, I don’t give a flying FCK about Google payouts, adsense, adwords, and maybe I care a little about G-analytics. When I look at domains, I see “END USERS”. I don’t see PPC payouts as my source, and they never were except when I managed hundreds of thousands of domains for my clients several years ago. Now, I feel sorry those clients own those domains, cuz I KNOW they’re losing at least 90% of their 2006 rev.
So, I’ve been watching for dev site companies, which is why I joined Whypark, and started developing some of my own asskickers. I try to keep quiet about them, because Elliot gets all the kudos and attention anyways… he’s cuter and younger than me. Who wants to listen to an old man? (heh)
You want to screw up Google’s profits, everyone? Save your money for three months, then jump off their bandwagon and go to some other PPC aggregate. In other words. Boycott. Always works, always has.
Who in their right minds actually determines their domain success based on partnering up with non-transparent companies? Those who rode the toboggan at the beginning at the run, and now the run is over. It’s summer now at the Winter Domain Olympics, there’s no snow or ice.
So many other monetization choices, it surprises me that people still depend on PPC at Google.
“MONEY TALKS NOBODY WALKS”
REMEMBER..
If you work for the MAN..
you will only get what you can
S**T
@RBK at Elephant Traffic we provide a platform which allows advertisers to bid on traffic from domains. Our system might not be the nicest or the most user friendly on the market, and we definitely don’t have the formula fully figured out yet… But where we do get it right, (where we succeed to find a a good match between the advertiser and the traffic) we can beat parking revenue by a couple hundred %.
Because Google takes such a huge portion of the revenue from clicks for themselves, selling domain traffic directly to advertisers can both increase domainer’s revenue and save advertisers money.
“selling domain traffic directly to advertisers can both increase domainer’s revenue and save advertisers money.”
That’s why a Hybrid between Parking Companies & affiliate companies could be a good thing for everyone. They both have access to the 3 most valuable people in the equation, Traffic (domains/domainers) – Advertisers (business affiliates) and either Google or Yahoo PPC ads
A good looking landing page with (affiliate) Logos and a proper description of the companies in the main page section, PPC links on the right side of the page (similar to Google).
Done right and the affiliate links/logos might be more popular with users, if the visitor does’nt buy /book anything then the advertiser does’nt have to pay anything.
Google PPC would become less important to everyone!
(….in an ideal world !)
it’s true, end users should be the focus.
that’s why seo (focussing on the search engine) seems so ridiculous.
the internet’s top search engine (“se”) will always be a popular site. (that top spot hasn’t always been google.) in addition, the top se is a site that knows a bit about its users: because they don’t just click, they *all* submit *input* via a web form.
so the top se will always have a good connection with advertisers.
and there will always be other popular sites besides se’s.
each has value to advertisers.
if you want the same level of appeal to advertisers that the top se site has, then you have to build a better se. (it is certainly possible. pagerank has its flaws, as we all know. there’s room for improvement. but how “hungry” do you think google can be, given their monopoly status, to outdo themselves and replace pagerank with something even better?)
otherwise, you can just be a popular site of a different kind. you will still have appeal to advertisers. you can have more narrow focus. you can still do well.
look at the top 5 or top 10 sites. they are not all se’s. i think it will walways be this way. there will be se sites and non-se sites. “search” and “portal”. “pull” and “push”.
every user will use both types of sites, though not in the same proportion.
if you want what google has… devise a better scheme than pagerank.
building the cache is not the hard part. nor is searching it. the hard part is presenting the results in a “better” way. relying on inlinks as a primary indicator of site “importance” and using it as a basis on which to rank results (then tweaking it over an over) has been done. so what’s next? something else will surely come along.
i’m still waiting for the “ultsearch”. lol.