You own DMOZ, now what?

[wheel]

Per [webmasterworld.com...] , esteemed member BBW suggests DMOZ is past it's due date. That's clearly been the case for a long time.

Still, DMOZ is a pretty large website and must take some decent traffic. There could be something there, specifically in the way of monetization, maybe even revitalization.

If you owned DMOZ today, what would you do to monetize the site?

[wheel]

Me: I would wonder about the often touted idea of a hand edited SE. Accept submissions, hand review websites, only crawl sites that pass a personal review.

If you tightened up the review process so it was less prone to personal opinion, maybe. I believe one could get some substantial press and links to it, as I suspect there's still some grass roots folks out there that believe in the DMOZ model.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I would start to accept submissions from the UK. There's over 60 million of us here you know. ;)

[incrediBILL]

I can't even believe anyone is discussing DMOZ

Real users don't even know what it is, they don't go there, only SEOs use it and whether that currently has any value is highly questionable.

What's next, Alexa rankings?

[wheel]

Bill, this is along the lines of 'what would you do if you won the lottery'.

[vik_c]

I would start paid inclusion.

[incrediBILL]

Bill, this is along the lines of 'what would you do if you won the lottery'.

I understand, but discussing monetizing something run by moderators that don't moderate is hardly winning the lottery.

It should've been paid inclusion from the start with actual unbiased paid employees running it, and then we would've called it Yahoo!, they won the lottery.

This dog has died, might as well try monetizing Alta Vista about now ;)

[wheel]

Dude we're in foo. Live a little :).

[incrediBILL]

I am living, I love smacking DMOZ around, it's a hobby.

[scooterdude]

try get the money you paid for the directory back before google finds out :)

[edited by: scooterdude at 4:07 pm (utc) on May 30, 2011]

[Leosghost]

Personally I'd lease it to wheel..for a monthly fee and percentage of revenue ;-)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Dmoz doesn't get enough traffic to make any money from, some say it's been dragging along at 400 people a month (MONTH!) and many of those are there for self serving reasons no doubt, to check position or register for a free backlink etc.

I'd like to see it locked up like an archive honestly, before it gets abused and loses the only thing it has going for it... it's widely known name.

[g1smd]

If you owned DMOZ today, what would you do to monetize the site?

I would start paid inclusion.

The charter excludes that from happening.

[incrediBILL]

The charter excludes that from happening.

Sounds like the only way to monetize DMOZ is as a big fat whopping expense on the bottom of a tax return which is probably all AOL does with it.

I'd just pull the plug and call it a day.

[beren]

I remember back when I cared about DMOZ that many of their editors derived apparent psychic pay from their positions. Yeah, there was no money, but they were proud of their status as guardians of the Internet against unscrupulous spammers. The hierarchy seemed a natural development of a group of a particular kind of nerd who enjoyed little status in the real world, and so played up the importance of status in DMOZ world - World of Warcraft with all its levels is based on the same drive for status.

The old searchengineforums.com, when their founder Jim was alive, even had a special rule against saying anything bad about ODP. You could criticize Yahoo, Google, etc all day, but ODP was off-limits because the forums were lucky enough to have meta-editors around to answer questions.

[ron15]

DMOZ is just a link farm. At one time it may have had relevance to a given category, but that was squandered long ago by the games and corruption. I would just shut it down, no one will notice or care. Save some power in the data center.

[live3life]

Doesn't AOL own DMOZ

[Leosghost]

Crap ..that's torn it then...sorry wheel :(

[apauto]

Someone from DMOZ looked at my site today, I submitted my site about two weeks ago.

If it was approved, anyone know how long until it shows up on the site from this point?

thanks