Newspapers Going Free

The NYT just went free and likely the WSJ will follow. Once something goes free it is hard to start charging for it again - just ask Prince.

Getting Real Information From Google

A few years ago some Google human review documents were leaked stating things they considered spammy at that time. Google usually gives webmasters misinfomation about organic search results, but their advice on AdWords ads is typically clearer in how they want to shape the web. The Inside AdWords blog just classified ebook sites as being similar to other types of sites that are likely to get hit by quality score issues.

Google will push selling ebooks that are published by a publisher they have a deal with, but if you are selling information outside of a large Google partner and Google is not hosting your content (and getting a cut of the action) they don't want you to be selling ebooks on their web. To be fair, for every satisfied ebook purchaser there are likely many people who paid to buy an ad formatted and sold as information, as marketers have abused the ebook format.

General Web Publishing Trends

• each day the web collectively improves how page elements are used (example: using tabs better)
• relevancy algorithms and ad networks make the most useful or most profitable business models easier to find while less sophisticated or lower value formats / models / businesses die
• a near endless sea of information becomes freely available, as information gets commodified by open competitors
• technology decreases the cost of creating interactive experiences (you can embed Google presentations in your web pages and hold live real-time chats)

Profitable Longterm Sales Growth

Given those trends I think the 4 big things we will see in selling information are

• demise of one time sales based business models - they are nowhere near as profitable as subscription based models, and they expose the merchant to lower end customers that are less likely to invest enough to succeed or invest in recurring charge based models
• the rise free and ad supported - if information is generic in nature and not time sensitive then it is going to get harder and harder to charge for it, especially if little value is shared before the sales pitch and Google is trying to clean these types of sites out of the advertisement slots as well
• people paying to distribute valuable information for free - I recently saw an AdWords ad for OpenCourseWare from the Sloan Business School. They are not only giving their courses away, but now they are paying to give it away. This means that if you go to MIT you are paying for the interaction, format, certificate, and atmosphere. You are not paying for learning or information. In a couple years, in many industries, better free information will exist than what you currently pay to access.
• subscription for interactive stuff with various formats - Google just launched their Gadget ads. As ads get richer and can show more I think the keys to selling will be to use a variety of formats to convey your messages, give people more than they want and let them consume the parts that are most interesting to them, and come up with formats that feel personalized and interactive. Publishing will become less about investing in a variety of projects until you find a hit and more about the art of investing in relationships.

The Microsoft AdCenter blog posted that 35% of top search queries are brand related:

Approximately 35% of the top searches in the UK, USA and France are brand related, which gives you an idea just how brand focused our Live Search users are. If your brand is strong (and strong brands come in all shapes and sizes) include it in at least in one of your ad titles and try to get it in the descriptions too! We have often seen click through rates (CTRs) increase when brand names have been included effectively.

Brands are like attention...if your brand is healthy you have an endless number of streams of profit waiting to be unlocked. And brand keywords are easy to own because of the resonance.

• if others outrank you for your own brand then your public relations stinks or you have major SEO issues
• if others out monetize you for your own brand then your business model needs improved

Investing brand related profits into awareness related marketing helps reinforce your market position. Even if the ad return is at a break even point it still helps you by building additional attention that leads to additional citations.

WebmasterWorld recently had another debate on which is more important: links or content. But the debate is flawed. Links or content alone are just one type of asset. You might be able to profit from either for a while, but ultimately the real measure of relevancy and staying power is attention.

When you have a new idea can you spread it? You can do the most amazing thing in the world that would alter the course of history, but if you have no attention it goes nowhere. Days / months / years later somebody comes by and steals / repackages / reformats / relaunches your idea and is hailed a brilliant futurist. You wait in line for their autograph, and can do nothing but laugh or cry because you know you already published that idea, but unfortunately you did it at the wrong place or wrong time or you used the wrong headline.

An old site that already ranks well can see self reinforcing links for years until someone launches a better idea and owns that idea. But if ignored eventually someone will take the idea from you. If you do not have enough attention you do not have the margins needed to be sustainable and fight off competition. If you run a network without adequate attention it turns to spam.

A profitable SEO running a sustainable longterm website is an attention whore. They learn how ideas spread, what types of ideas spread, and how to format them to help them spread. They tap into the human ego and dig deep into psychology to help others want to help them. Marketers spread lies if the payout is high enough. Other times people accidentally spread inaccuracies, but that works too because people talking about it grants you more authority and reading the feedback forces you to learn more.

Some marketers are conservative and like to quietly build links and attention over time. Others like to see their name on the front page of the newspaper or Digg. Both ways work, but links are just a proxy for conversation and attention. Search engines follow people.

Once you have attention you can do whatever you want. Who cares if 90% of your ideas fail? You learn from every failure, content can easily be reformatted, and other good ideas come out of remains of past failures. You only need 1 to be really successful to be set for life. And if you keep trying to launch innovative valuable ideas then people are going to keep talking about you until you launch a success. And when it launches people will talk about it because you already have their attention.

Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.

The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.

Quintura recently made a search page for Seo Book. Their search service is likely going to be more useful for large publishers with millions of pages than it is on a personal blog, but give it a try and see what you think.

Their cloudlike visual search service is a great tool for finding related keyword modifiers used in competing sites, but I don't think we will see such technology front and center at the mainstream search engines anytime soon due to future advertising regulation which will make it harder to integrate ads and make search results more profitable than the current Google format is. Though I would love to see their technology integrated against social bookmarking sites and personal search history data.