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Not Good...
I hope this is temporary.
Since all LookSmart listings pay the same $0.15, the rankings will be based on number of clicks(?) - a big improvement in relevance over Overture - and revenue over the old LookSmart (at least for MSN). It looks like Looksmart will be half Overture and half DirectHit.
I'm guessing Google was eating MSN big time because Google's listings were better, more relevant. (Has MSN been losing market share to Google?) So MSN decided to try to improve relevance and click-cash at the same time by forcing LookSmart to "reposition" itself.
How about right now? a search for "Costa Rica" returns 2 msn.expedia listings in the first set of 3 "featured sites" followed by 3 "sponsored sites" from Overture, followed by 10 "web directory" sites that contains yet an other msn.expedia in the third position.
So msn.expedia is seamlessly bundled with msn.search, just like the browser thing, right? Surely a plus for consumers...
Worst than not being able to advertise in 2 years, you will not be even listed in the fist page at all on msn, especially with the new expensive scam of L$.
(edited by: mundonet at 7:56 am (utc) on April 20, 2002)
In some cases, this has been provded wrong with the failure of "Bob", the paperclip, and their first MSN effort back in the early 90's to build a bigger compuserve type private network to take on the public Web head on.
But in many cases they have been proved right.
MSN's strategy is based on the premise that people balue of conveneince of a MSN search box on their default portals/start pages, and are too lazy to find out if there is any better way to "find stuff on the web".
Im pretty sure they know that with all this high level paid listings dominating their listings, that their relevance is shot for anybody wanting to find specific, timely and credible non commercial sources.
But im pretty sure they feel people are too lazy and stupid to look elsewhere.
Agree with Learning curve in one point with a ualification. Yes this will certainly increase their revenue, but the qualification being the short term and medium term only as a sure thing. the long term depends on how correct their assumptions are about the studidity and laziness of their users.
I disagree that their listings will be more relevant. I cant see many Looksmart listings in the furture apart from high pressure sales sites, and major corporations. Never mind the UNESCO, University, UN and many NGO and government sites provide much valuable info for free, MSN will ensure that you wont see these, only those sources that package this info in pretty colors and sell it for a heap of bucks!
As with all emerging markets, at the beginning there is multiple players gradually crushed or taken over by the big guys. And the big guys getting fewer and bigger as time goes by. It's the inherent beauty of the free market: the biggest market forces take over the market at the end of the game. Concentration stops only when the last players are too big to eat or kill each other, or make an agreement to share the pie, or when anti-trust regulation kicks in (providing that the big guys did not pay there way in the government with a president or political party).
Because there is billions of web pages, the only way to find your way though this mass of information is the SE's & portals. Big corporation are not stupid, they will overtake the SE's & portals to reach their consumers and mostly to grow their market share.
They are paying their way in, relevancy of content will become irrelevant. SE's want to be big corporations too so they will take the money. In capitalism well ... capital is the main ingredient!
It's frightening to see that there is only Google left out there where you have a chance to be in the top 10 with a quality relevant site regardless of how big your wallet is. I hate to put all my hopes on the integrity philosophy of a corporation who is bound to make an IPO and become a big corporation itself. Even if you rely on the gradual education of surfers so they switch to use a relevant less commercial SE, you are loosing a sizable chunk of casual surfers that happen to be a huge part of our market.
The only future is see for a relevant pure search result SE is a not for profit one. Maybe a government thing a la BBC, or by a university, or a cooperative, or a private one that charges a subscription fee and guarantees relevant unbiased by $ results. For the moment, nobody would pay for an SE service, but a few years down the road, maybe I would shed $5 per month to have access to searches without featured, partner, paid, popup, & tutti quanti altered corrupted listings by money
So we optimize & submit, and PPC with Overture on search terms that big guys did not think about yet. Every day we are losing the bidding war on more & more keywords as the top bids are getting more expensive than a reasonable ROI. Problem is a big corp can bid more because they not only factor in the revenue of the sale but also branding & long term market share. Think of the x box case.
I am not surprise if msn drops Overture or L$ as they get advertisers paying more than the top bids of either for a search term.
We hope that surfers will vote with their mice and go to SE's were we can get in the top 10 by sheer relevancy & quality content, but we are not too naive about it. I think I'll pour myself a tall glass of scotch.
On the other hand, in my opinion, what makes PPC advertising so successfull, is that anybody is invited: A few years ago, advertising on a major search engine was far too expensive for small or even medium business web sites, a few thousand $$ was the minimum budget for even the smallest campaigns. Today you can start a campaign on all the big search engines with a handful of money. For the se owners, this became a new and important stream of revenue.
So why should search engines lock out the "small people" in favor of the big companys? Without the small business owners, PPC would be dead, wouldn´t it?
Have you forgotten about the concept of dissemination of technology? Let me elaborate.
The great algo that Google developed that finds relevant results wes developed by two guys at Stanford. Those two guys are now the third largest search property in the World.
Now, Teoma claims to have an algo that is better than Googles's, and will find even more relevant results (though I haven't seen it yet); and the Teoma algo was also developed by only a couple of University guys. As a result, Teoma got bought by Ask Jeeves in order to try win some of the SE market share (so far without success).
Next month or next year some other college student will come up with an algo that makes Google look like "Spam-ville," and they will then through the same dynamics that made Google well-know (viral online communication). This will undoubtably make the big Corporate 'posers' like M$N, L$, and Yahoo look even worse then they look now.
Then, after another month or year somebody else will develop an even better algo.
This is called capitalism, and we don't need to turn search technology over to the state (a proven black hole for R&D; which is why the U.S. Govt. now has it's own Venture Capital incubator in Silicon Valley).
Karl Marx is the same as Microsoft in that he plays on the fears and laziness of the weak and lazy. The difference is Karl Marx says, "Let the state do it;" and Microsoft says, "let us do it." In both cases market forces constantly prove that living off of the weak and fearful can work, but only for a period. Then, pardigm shifts take place that make the stagnate postitions of even the lazy and fearful masses change.
It's so hard to believe that in 2002 people are still quoting Marx as though he were authoritative. Hasn't 80 years of failed communist-socialist governments, and countless dead "travelers" been enough to discredit one man's utopian dreams?
No, not really. Failed execution of an idea doesn't negate the idea itself.
LookSmart, however, is more relevant than Overture. So, on the other hand, to the degree MSN substitutes LookSmart for Overture listings, MSN relevance improves.
About government, well let's not forget that the web itself was invented by a subsidized government project. Same for the new Japanese super computer for earth warming climate prediction project, 7 times faster than IBM's US subsidize military one (how useful!).
sudden, sure that PPC is a door for small campaigns, we are bidding ourselves successfully on more than 150 keywords. But the tendency is
that we are getting gradually bumped out the top spots by bids that we cannot simply afford. We are small and quick, so we manage to find some holes in the bidding pattern of the big guys, but we are realist about the basic tendency of big corp overtaking the market. Do you remember the time when there was no PPC at all, when you got for free in the top 10 with strait forward optimization & good content?
Sure, there will be new Googles that Joe public will gradually discover, but a sizable chunk of Joe's will stay on paid listing SE and portals, a big chunk of lost market for us. If Google is 1/3 of searches, that still leaves 2/3 of the market that cost big $ to reach.
We are still in the Far west epoch of the web with plenty of opportunities & available niche, but nothing will stop the steam roller of the big
corporations on the long term.
What's wrong with a subsidized SE public service, it could be managed by a consortium of Universities for example, exactly how the web got public in the first place.
lawman
Back to msn, with msn's advertisers in the top spot and with an algo choosing the most expensive listings for the second set and L$ new scam for the third set, I guess that means bye-bye being on the fist result page pretty soon, right?
I have seen some of my overture listing appearing in the "Ten Most Popular" area for at least a few weeks.
cuz i see my overture listings in msn!
-Andrea
A direct search in Ask Jeeves gave me 5 Overture PPC before the "You may find my search results helpful"... if you did not already cliked on our PPC's, he he!
Nobody is pushing communism here, I'm talking about pure capitalism driving the SE's "search results" and the need of a public service relevant SE not-for-profit that would serve people looking for something else than widgets for sale (which we do ourselves via PPC).
An attractive alternative that would force them to more decency and force them to put all their different flavors of paid listings under this simple title: Paid Listings.
