Re: Yahoo (Price) Suprise!
Look at Yahoo and other search engines as prospecting
tools and nothing more. No business or web site can
afford to depend on prospecting for 100% of their traffic
or business. The increases in pricing are signals that
search engine influence is decreasing. They are
struggling to find yet another revenue model that will
support the overhead of database management. Other search
engines have turned to pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-rank.
But the instability of listings, rankings and submissions
make the group a poor provider of traffic. Any site that
truely analyzes their traffic will be surprised at the
actual traffic delivered to the average web site. It's
low, in some categories and keywords you can count them on
one hand each month. It completely depends on the consumer
activity in a particular category or for specific keywords.
At the same time portals are strengthening as AOL, MSN,
Earthlink and AT&T, to mention a few, take the internet
wireless and lock down the search function via service or
device. Independent retailers will increasingly need a
new traffic strategy. As a traffic specialist, I recently
did a complete report on the impact of search engines on
web site traffic.
Don Lokke Jr CEO
Lokke Advertising
http://www.usa5.com
Received on Tue Jan 22 2002 - 15:38:29 CST
