Lycos Europe & Espotting sell top5

GB to start, France and germany to follow

[heini]

ZDNet.de [news.zdnet.de] brought in the bad news today. Lycos has made the deal with Espotting Media. Top5 will be on auction, starting in GB on 9th of July. Germany and France are to follow till the end of 2001.
Alright. So top5 will be sold directly. The rest comes from PartnerSite poisened Fast. Great news.

[rencke]

Let's see if I understood the article correctly:

Espotting Media is guaranteeing a minimum revenue of 10,7 million Euros (US$9,0 mill) to Lycos Europe in exchange for the top 5 spots in search replies. Espotting will sell the placements to the general public in an online auction, which appears to be similar to GoTo's - OR??? The UK will be first and it starts there on July 9. Germany and France to follow later this year.

I must confess, that I have never heard of Espotting before, so I checked their site. It appears that this story is so new that they haven't even got their own press release out yet. They say that they are providing paid results for 55 million searches per month at such engines as "Ask Jeeves, NTL, easyEverything cafés, UK Plus, Netscape, Supanet, Zoom, Searchengine.com, & many more..."

55 million per month is not much, when you consider that Google has 100 millon per day and Altavista 50 million. But I guess the figure will increase dramatically as soon as they have updated their site with Lycos Europe statistics.

And I wonder what Lycos users are going to say about this. Relevancy is likely to take a big plunge.

[henki]

Well, they will at least mark the bought results.
We remember what happened when AltaVista tried to do the same two years ago. They had no real check for relevancy and soon enough the searches where so deluted that AV had to back out of it.

In the same time I see that SEOs will be more like media advisors in the future. We help the clients to buy exposure in different search engines. We need to know what programmes are most effective, sign with them at competetive rates and to work out what words to use.

[oLeon]

It´s the same as we can see at Lycos.com, AV.com etc where Goto has placed its buisness. Now the featured links at Lycos.fr -and other european clones- shall come from espotting. No reason to despair, the links shall be separated from the other results (as I understood). As the users can notice that these are sponsored links, I cannot see a problem - not as you can see at AV.com, it´s hard to differ the regulary results from the featured links.

...buisness as usual...

Our buisness as SEOs is changing I assume we all know that. Whether we become ordinary advertiser without a need to know how SEs work - I don´t think so. But who did think about the internet-buisness like it is now two years ago?

[heini]

Our moderator is truly a multilingual genius!
Rencke´s translation is on the point. More info is not available at the moment, neither Espotting nor Lycos have offered any press releases so far.
Relevancy? Hey, we are talking SEs in 2001! There is only one still standing, which of course is Google.
Henki, AV may have backed out, but look at their serps right now: it´s a mess!

(edited by: heini at 4:39 pm (gmt) on July 4, 2001

[caine]

That's worrying, as i do especially well with lycos and fast.
July the 9th is so close.

I know who espotting are - ppc boys like Goto, however, i managed to get into espotting (pure luck!) without paying the ransom, so i'm wondering if that would feed the lycos.co.uk results, after the 9th ?

Does anyone know who espotting feeds off ? as well as their ransom.

[Mike_Mackin]

Search results now appear on:
Ask Jeeves
easyEverything cafés
UK Plus
Netscape
Supanet
NTL
Searchengine.com
Kanoodle

[rencke]

>work out what words to use

Yep. That's what I figure too. The future lies in keyword mining and careful analysis. That's where the money is going to be in the future.

[makemetop]

This is the first official announcement of something that has been on the rumour mill in the UK for about 4-5 weeks. $9 million is a hefty guarantee for e-spotting and I hope that it works for them.

I'll be interested to see how it effects Lycos results. If they show as featured will it generate the traffic required - if they are merged into the standard results will it effect relevency? Think I'll watch and wait for now ;)

[Black Knight]

For those who haven't heard of Espotting, I can vouch that it has been the best value PPC for my recent campaigns in the UK. Tracking referrals from UK.Goto.com and Espotting.com shows that Espotting refferals average higher page views, and a far higher conversion rate for the site in question (which has broad appeal to consumers).

Traffic from Espotting is far higher than traffic from uk.goto.com and because I can often grab better keywords without breaching the ROI level, my traffic from Espotting is actually almost equal in volume, and far superior in quality, to that of the US/Global Goto.com traffic.

[rencke]

Espotting still hasn't got ZDnet's story on their site and I can't get through to any of the Lycos sites in Europe. What's going on? The Spray sites are up, but not Lycos itself.

[NFFC]

>Tracking referrals from UK.Goto.com and Espotting.com shows that Espotting refferals average higher page views, and a far higher conversion rate for the site in question

lol, just to confirm what a strange game this is I find exactly the opposite. So much so that all espotting campaigns have been suspended.

[Black Knight]

NFFC: If I had the same positions on the same words on both, then that would probably be true for me too. However, I got better placements and better words for my top-bid-allowance at Espotting by far, and that made all the difference in the world.