Almost any broadly accepted measure of productivity contains self serving holes. GDP grows every year because it incorrectly account for costs as productivity. For example, GDP shows a gain when there is a natural disaster, when we deplete resources, or when we replace healthy social relationships with destructive chemical ones. Any financial activity is treated as a good thing with GDP, even if we are destroying the planet or replacing natural supplements with expensive drugs, manufacturing diseases that need to be treated, or treating people for abusing drugs.

You can save up a lot of money, but what happens when there are fundamental shifts in energy supplies? You can print more money, but you can't create energy from nothing.

John Scott compares the quality of AdWords leads to leads from word of mouth:

Running an Adwords campaign has brought in a few customers, but the number is minuscule in comparison to our #1 source of new customers: Referral by existing customers.

It's a hard fact to accept. You see all that search engine traffic, and it looks like a pot of gold, but it isn't. A lot of window shopping, even for those uber relevant terms like "buy links".

AdWords is good for gaining mindshare and building links, but many of the AdWords clickers are of the one off variety. You keep paying for the traffic but do not build much momentum for the price (unless you create content tailored for links). Many business models reliant on AdWords will die if those ad buys don't convert into more meaningful relationships.

I have one client that outranks his main supplier for their name on MSN, ranks just below them on Google and Yahoo!, and yet is wondering why sales are not higher. Our site also outranks most competing sites for long tail keywords. What happened to sales? Yahoo! puts many ads above the fold, and Google gives the main supplier an extended sitelinks enhanced listing. That drives down the organic listings for the core search terms, which makes the ads more important.

Some competing businesses sell a wider array of products from more manufacturers, and gain many repeat purchases due to their branding and wide array of product selection. Service businesses do not scale as well as ad based businesses and other easy to automate businesses, but if there is no relationship building in the transaction it is hard to compete with businesses that sell their commodity products as a tailored personalized service.

• MSN is considering adding images to their search ads.

• AOL recently showed graphic ads near their search results for some seasonal searches.
• The Yahoo! Directory offers image ads in some categories, like web design.
• Google sold Ford run of network AdSense ads for Ford Explorer.
• Google offers a distributed pay per action ad network which does NOT clearly mark their ads.
• Google is starting to offer interactive gadget ads.
• Google arbitrages their own search results with large ugly Google Checkout ads and video content from Google Video and YouTube.
• Marissa Mayer just hinted that Google is willing to consider selling graphical ads on Google.com.

How long until search engines are the biggest affiliates on the web? And when they do that, will affiliate marketing still be looked down upon the way SEO and domaining are? Better yet, will we have any way to know who is buying the ad or how it is priced?

Frank Schilling and Andy Hagans both wrote posts about the bogus worldview of the role of SEOs. Frank also highlighted that most every industry gets this treatment:

It seems to me that the only groups "incapable of doing wrong" on the Internet are either the browser, operating systems or Google. Even when these groups are clearly doing wrong they are incapable of doing wrong in the media's and public's eyes. Everyone else eventually gets maligned as a dark-hearted "neer do well" or "rounder".

Yet in spite of this treatment, people like Rand give tips on things like segmenting search intent nearly every day, Blue Hat SEO shares real world SEO examples, Shoemoney shares his designer, Eric Enge interviews search engineers, and DaveN is even willing to tell you when new link buying algorithms roll in.

Don't forget that the people telling stories about fighting spam or fighting for good are often full of crap. Take Collactive, for example. Here we have a company backed by Seqouia (which also backed Google) which is creating a marketplace for spamming social media sites. The same company behind Collactive was originally behind Blue Frog, which aimed to stop email spam. Why did they shift for being against spam to promoting it? Money. That is all most businesses are interested in anyhow.

Google doesn't care about spam if it is through AdSense. The lines between signal vs noise, ethical vs unethical, and friend vs foe change depending on where the stack of money is largest. Anytime you read a business drone on about ethics make sure to think about the self serving nature of their advice.

Google is willing to give sites like Forbes a top ranking for keywords like SEO just because they published a recent article mentioning the topic. In a world where Google is closing more holes, them opening up the organic results to news sites is a treat to public relations firms.

Digg is similar, they don't think it is spam if it comes from ABC. But, if you have access to a media outlet, you can gather up a couple anonymous sources and publish garbage that would easily make Digg's home page.

You can think of old media as acting like directories for new media. New media is heavily reliant on old media for understanding the structure and importance of ideas. Those who know this are willing to pay a premium for the top channels. That is why Sam Zell bought The Tribune Company, News Corp. wants to buy Dow Jones, and why Thomson is buying Reuters. I recently spoke at a well known PR firm, and on their walls they hung dozens of newspaper articles written for their clients. It is the equivalent of how an SEO might look at the top rankings they have got for their clients and their own sites.

As time passes, marketing will get more expensive, and larger businesses will continue to be able to abuse the flow of information to knock down smaller and newer competitors and competing business models while smaller players have to tell more authentic, better researched, or more emotional stories to get the same level of exposure.

If you haven't thought much about how PR is integrated into the news, consider reading Paul Graham's The Submarine. It will make you realize how much every successful large scale business relies on some form of spam to build their brand, create demand, thicken their margins, and keep newer players out of their business.

I got thinking about that speech I gave at that PR firm. I have no idea if they will use my tips to push good ideas, or if they will use them to push inventions that reduce quality of life or kill people. When you get as much exposure as I have been lucky enough to get you just don't know what will happen with what you do...you can't see the outcome, but will probably see more of what you chose to see. I generally have a strong belief in strength of humanity, but also think capitalism is shortsighted, destructive, and sleazy. So which do I chose to see as benefiting more from my existence?

The biggest reason I do not blindly support capitalism is that I think as governments and countries age their law codes and markets get so complex that it is hard to know what is real or true, especially when people are rushed, live in debt, and the leading information agents are focused on profit, personalization, automation, promoting strong biases, and blending ads into content.

The media, like all businesses, operates with some level of collusion. If you are not in their spotlight you are at a distinct disadvantage to those who are. How do we get media coverage? Well that is another post. :)