…"Google’s phenomenal
ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any
industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to
the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners. "It’s
Google’s world," shrugs Chris Tolles, vice-president of marketing at
Topix Inc., which makes money from running Google ads on its news
aggregation site. "We just live in it."
A lesson from Google: A major part of how Google stopped Yahoo was by offering a better advertising offering to advertisers, with Adwords. Adwords was really the Overture model with a little tweak that made it more logical to advertisers, and more profitable to Google.
In order to stop Google companies need to think how to kill or seriously hurt the cash cow. In Google’s case, that would be adwords/adsense. Since for search engines, PPC advertising mainly works today on IP tracking, one way to do that is for major companies to unite and block tracking (from ISP’s networks for example). If done fast enough (before pay per action takes off), then their whole model would collapse.
There are other methods of course but I think whatever they are, in order to work well, you must attack their cash cow. Unlike what many think, I don’t think this is only about a better search product.
"….I took my health vertical (several thousand generic domain names) and plumbed the names to the most relevant category or topic within the web site.
Result? If you type depressed.com (or several thousand other health related names) you now come to search content written by a medical doctor, that other professionals can update and anyone can share their experiences on. The parent site instantly gets more than 30,000 unique health visits a day from thousands of generic health related domains that point to different facets of the site; and the whole affair is self monetized through paid-search.
This is the kind of thing that illustrates the power of domains. Watch what happens as our users improve the content and as we begin to arbitrage thousands of visits a day from Google to these new content rich, arb-friendly pages.
That’s the dream anyway. If every domain aggregator created a wiki for each name complete with relevant content and surrounded by paid search listings for monetization, it would dramatically alter the balance of power on the web between empty domain names and search engines."
Definitely sounds like a good approach. Once content is in place Franky can not only arbitrage traffic from the big search engines but offer other domain owners who have fitting domains deals to send traffic directly. Expanding on the content, he can also make deals with other website owners to syndicate the data, editable, to related sites, attracting more eyeballs which will drive more usage and monetization of this venture.
There’s so much more he can do to build/develop from here on.
What this really proves, time and again, is domains are the very raw land. With generic type-in domains, the only way is up up up.
For fiscal year 2007, the Committee determined that all of Google’s executive officers, other than Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would be participants in the Plan. The Committee set the maximum amount payable to any one executive in the fiscal year 2007 at $4.5 million. The actual bonus paid to individual executives will be based on a formula tied to Google’s non-GAAP operating income. The Committee retains discretion to reduce or eliminate (but not increase) the bonus that would otherwise be payable.
What does this mean to Yahoo/MS? You better start offering better and more competetive incentives or talent will find its way to the big G.
For the past 13 years, how you put a picture
on the Web has not changed. You slap together a couple <img> tags
and your photo sits there - or, at best, you use a site like Flickr or
Photobucket to insert the <img> tag for you. No site has bothered
to provide interactive, digital camera-ish features to your online
photos until now. Here’s a look at what BritePic will let your photos
do. First
and foremost, you can put non-intrusive ads at the top of your photos.
So instead of ads flashing around your photos that (well, face it) get
ignored, now you’ll have an ad powered by AdBrite sitting in prime real
estate. You can add scrolling captions that slide across the photo, and with
one click, email and link your image. A menu bar at the bottom left
corner of your photo will soon allow you to do interactive stuff like
rate and discuss images, view in a gallery and subscribe to an RSS feed
of updates.
Photobucket generates revenue through premium accounts, and advertising
on the site. The rumor is that they are nearing break even, and aren’t
spending much of the $15 million they’ve raised in venture capital ($8
million or so is left in the bank).
Basically, Photobucket is kicking butt. So the question is, how much are they worth?
$300 - $400 million or more, says Lehman Brothers, the investment
bank they’ve hired to explore a sale of the company, in private talks
with potential buyers.
Now imagine applying the britepic model to photobucket? How much more could photobucket be worth then? Suddenly a digital content hosting business model sounds alot more appealing.
As noted at ThreadWatch, Google has just integrated an MLS-like system for the job market. It seems to me like a great new direction to take Google to the next level, across the board. My prediction is real estate market is next followed by some financial markets (credit cards, mortgage, investments). Just mind-boggling how an internet company one minute seem to be fully valued (which I also agreed at time of Franky’s post) and the next has this huge growth opportunities right around the corner.
Following Part
I, less then 24 hours after my original post (not sure if they are reading
my blog or just a coincidence), Google has now addressed the issue.
Yahoo on the other hand still displays image-like sponsor links.
Today someone from my work informed me about some rather strange MSN is
doing. When you go to MSN.co.uk (yes .co.uk, not .com) you will come
to the MSN home page with all the usual “˜noise’ on it. However you’ll
notice straight away what’s in the search box.
They could start selling those spots to the highest bidder, charge per time displayed or clicks, or some other selling model. This concept has allot of potential for extra income for search engines.
“Young people are just smarter,”? he said with a straight face. “Why are
most chess masters under 30?”? he asked. “I don’t know,”? he answered.
“Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not
have family.”? In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can
focus on big ideologies. He added, “I only own a mattress.”? Later:
“Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”?
It very much reminds me of myself at around his age. I thought I knew it all. I bet when he grows up and hit his 30’s he’s gonna look back at that comment and just smile, understanding how ignorant such a comment really is. If it proves something to the world is how old Mark really is. This comment really fits an ambitious and driven 22 YO kid.
Originally they called it "twttr," but when it leaked out and grew in
popularity, Stone says they "bought the vowels" and the domain name www.twitter.com.
From type-in traffic perspective, smart move indeed. If you have a web 2.0 type name, you should try to get the better version as well, or someone else will enjoy the fruits of your hard work.
MusicPlusTV.com launched a revamped
website today. As well as a new look, it has doubled the resolution of its
flagship 24/7 television broadcast stream, added social networking capabilities,
and more.
A sample of Currently free domains they should register before its too late..
TVPLUSMUSIC.COM (opposites, users at times remember the keywords, but not the order) MUSICPLUSTVS.COM (plural) MUSICPLUSTELEVISION.COM (synonym) RADIOPLUSTV.COM (conceptual) MUSICPLSTV.COM (missing letter, typo) MUSCPLUSTV.COM (missing letter, typo) MSICPLUSTV.COM (missing letter, typo)
Other typos are available (missing letters, jumble letters, dyslexic, etc)
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