service offering ownership of a keyword for 1 year

[kellyandsummer]

A service contacted me offering keyword ownership of premium keywords for $300/year. They say that anyone who types my keyword in the URL box of internet explorer instead of typing in a web address, will be sent to my site. They say they have 26 million users who have enabled this system within their internet explorer.

They distribute their software with other mainstream software on download.com - So say you downloaded something like ws_ftp (just as an example), you would also be forced to install this companies software in order to use ws_ftp.

Anyone familiar with this type of service?

[Receptional Andy]

My opinion - avoid this at all costs.

>>They distribute their software with other mainstream software on download.com

This is 'spyware', which in my experience provokes extremely negative feelings in your visitors.

The service you describes is a variant on the old realnames system, which as I recall went bust not that long ago?

Get happy visitors cheaply by optimising your site :)

[martinibuster]

Someone asks about this at least once a week, it seems.

Here's a post from ten days ago:
[webmasterworld.com ]

Here's a bunch more
[webmasterworld.com ]

[webmasterworld.com ]

[webmasterworld.com ]

[webmasterworld.com ]

No offense intended, but you can gain a whole lot of knowledge just trolling through the past posts, or doing a site search.

:) Y

[skibum]

Welcome to WW kellyandsummer!

Basically a scam IMO, though something like this could send more traffic than say, AV, FAST, or WiseNut. Wouldn't pay any of them either though.

Probably about 4-7% of search queries are done this way by entering something in the browser bar. Figure at least half of those are people who mis-type a URL, in which case these browser bar keywords would not kick in and then only a few people have this thing installed, its nto going to send any traffic....though their sales folks can be very convincing - especially after they get you to download their plugin.