Re: Click Tax

From: David Yancey <dyancey_at_intergen.co.uk>
Date: Fri 26 Apr 2002 23:23:25 -0600

I have read with interest all your posts on the trend toward
paid website listings and paid list ranking or positioning.
This issue is actually in its infancy, I feel, and, given
the background of past free search services, I am sure we
are going to see the controversy grow.

Once again, the discussion list format has proven its
utility, and thanks again are due to Cliff and Tenagra for
providing a forum where we who are most affected can debate
the issue of "free versus fee" in this newest
variation.

For that, I suggest, is the real issue here. When the web
was young, search was free - not because of any moral or
ethical imperative, but because until enough folks began to
use it and their usage patterns and preferences became
evident, and the volume of queries or other accesses reached
significant scale, the Internet had not achieved the
critical mass that makes a smallish set of activities into a
real market.

Now, as companies finally began to understand how to use the
web as a commercial medium, and as websites begin
to assume their natural role as sales and service platforms,
the search industry as a whole at last can start cashing in
from all the hard work of aggregating the traffic of
hundreds of millions of users.

To resent this emergence of the web as a commercial tool and
uber-selling platform seems unproductive. The economic
potential of any technology is always realized, sooner or
later. The fact that the vast majority of pages on the
web - still - were put there with little or no expectation
of commercial recompense is not the issue, IMO. We all can
celebrate the "little" free sites, academic sites, public
interests sites, great personal pages, and small publishers,
but that is not going to change the reality: it was simply
inevitable that the sites who had a business model mindset
and a commercial reason for being would reach a point where
their need for targeted traffic and potentially paying
visitors would command the rapt attention of the search
engines and directories.

These commercial sites need prospects and leads, and pay per
click (PPC) is a rational economic response to this demand.
As is Yahoo's tough new annual fee policy, and the other
paid-listings initiatives of Google and the rest. We can
even be objective enough to say that the policies of sharing
results and listings across otherwise "competing" engines
makes sense, economically, regardless of what it does to
confuse the searcher or make all engines' results trend
toward sameness and give off a pervasive sense of
bill-boarded visual noise so characteristic now of Yahoo and
the few remaining portals.

We can also complain about the costs, the inequities (for
there are several) and the seemingly endless time involved
now with the SEO process. But purchased traffic is not a
new phenomenon. Has it been so long that we have all
forgotten that the boom of 1999 and 2000 was mainly due to
the larger sites fighting it out for traffic using
over-priced, under-clicked banners? I am a hurting web
publisher, as many of you know, but I have to say that when
we publishers were basking in the glow of hot banner sales,
few realized and no one warned that it could all disappear
*once the traffic-hungry commercial sites learned a smarter,
CPC-based way to draw the crowds*.

It is too easy to bewail the "good old days", of free access
and
information for those who wanted it that way, and fat banner
sales for those who had semi-relevant inventory. It will be
more
productive if we consider where web search and traffic
aggregation is going from here, and what it will likely mean
to those of us with independent, small; or non-commercial
sites - or to those of us with broken business models that
rely too heavily on long-gone ad sales.

I suggest that:

1 - With the web steadily proving its worth as a business
messaging and transactions platform, we can see that
purchased traffic is not going away, but is going to be even
more prevalent.

2 - Sites who are unwilling or unable to pay for traffic
face even harder times and pressures ahead, because the
search industry is going to focus more and more on shaping
their services around the demand of the big sites.

3 - The users coming on now will generally accept the
encouragement of the search industry to drive them toward
the better-paying sites - that is the way media works, and
when those who want information or entertainment go along
with it, as they will, it makes it even less appealing for
the engines to support the old spidered-type search process.

4 - Spidered search will be relegated more and more to the
back burner, and not simply because it does not pay - it is
becoming too hard to do, and the many thousands of mostly
useless pages thrown up only serve to encourage most users
to go for easier-to-find, better promoted, more prominently
displayed paid listings.

5 - We can predict that the professional surfers - the
business users especially - and those up-market consumers
with money to spend will see the emergence of "boutique"
search tools that expressly cater to their topical interests
and especially to their need to get to the most relevant
pages in a hurry. Perhaps these users will be willing to
pay - it wont surprise me - or perhaps the niche search
services will use a variant of PPC to entice the big sites
who so badly want to reach these particular audience
segments.

6 - Sooner rather than later, the low-to-no SEO-budget sites
will be simply too hard for the normal user to find *quickly
enough*.

Pretty bleak, right? Unless one is in the PPC or related
business.

And that is where the "free" web-based publishing industry
is going to have to be, I predict. The only question is how
and when, not if, to move from the ad formats and
agency-ruled process of conventional ads to a messaging
model where those needing significant traffic can
*cost-effectively* get it from smaller sites, and,
especially, from emailed newsletters and lists like this
one. We publishers love to boast how targeted our
readership is, or how well we cover our selected area of
topical interest. Well, we are going to have to package all
that precision a whole lot better than we have to date, or
we will again fail to respond to the natural and totally
logical demand of the sites who can pay for our space or
page views.

As for the myriad other sites, the personal ones and
specialized interest ones that cannot or will not pay for
traffic, we can bet that the smarter niche search services
will see that it is in their self-interest to deliver these
results to their specialized audiences, for it is the
richness of relevant choice that will keep these
revenue-producing clickers coming back.

We can even expect that someone will sooner or later invent
a search platform that not merely serves the needs of the
big commercial website operators, but also provides
effective ways where the smaller sites and even individual
pages can be listed for very low fees, too. Free is dead,
probably, at least for those needing significant traffic.
But it is not asking a lot for a site that pays $10 to $25 a
month for minimal hosting to pay a like amount for
reasonable traffic.

We can also predict that a solution will be found that
finally frees us from the tyranny of blind key word parsing,
and provide a new standard of human-controlled relevance
closer to - or even better than - the "edited listing"
level, so that all these sites and pages can then be found
quickly by those who wish to see them.

We are developing such a search tool, and I am sure others
are, too. Not only because we have a special regard for the
millions of independent webmasters, but because,
collectively, they comprise a *market*, a potentially huge
one, and serving that market effectively will be the
foundation for at least some of the web's next wave of
success stories.

Or so we hope!

Just my own 2 cents worth, or maybe, Cliff, given Overture's
success, we should now say these posts are a minimum 5
cents?

[MODERATOR'S NOTE: David, given the length of this post, I'd
say this one is at least a dime! --Cliff]

David Yancey
Managing Director - Intergen Associates
CEO - Internet Business Forum, Inc
http://www.ibizCafe.com







Received on Sat Apr 27 2002 - 00:23:25 CDT