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Things are heating up now that AOL/Netscape and soon Lycos/HotBot are also returning the top GoTo listings.
The obvious change is an escalation of the bidding war. Since AOL kicked in, new players are showing up and bidding high -- and often these are sites whose offerings are not as closely targeted to the keyword as my client.
Since we're talking about top-3-only to get on AOL or top-2-only for Netscape, this is getting a bit intensive. Without a top three spot, the value of these new GoTo partnerships dissolves.
Right now, keyword bids are showing a drastic drop off after position 3 -- actually, the drop off seems to happen between 4 and 5. When someone new bids into the top keywords, they push the old position-3 down the ladder. Whenever this happens, that site is left paying a premium price for junior league traffic until they change their bid.
Remember when viagra was at $4 to $5?
It is now at 55 cents with steady bidding through 10 to 15
A good example of what you have posted would be - buy viagra
4 firms are after the top 3
2 firms are not sure what they are doing
and the rest of the top 15 are just bidding
We watch the top 3 bids by "agencies" with a BIG budget.
They don't seem to care what they pay.
It will be interesting to see if they drop out at the end of the year when the budget has expired.
We have had some success at 38 to 40
[ends ramble]
As I would have predicted, Netscape doesn't do for them, even with GoTo results perched on top. So number 3 is fine but if they slip to 4, then they get the same traffic as anywhere else on the first SERP.
