Select Distribution

I recently mentioned the Sigur Rós Hiema video, which was featured on the YouTube homepage for a day and probably got about a million pageviews. An SEO Book reader named Satish discovered that after the video built up a lot of viral media and link exposure the video was set to private mode.

Google video, as a DRM service, failed miserably. But providing custom hosting for member videos that can only be viewed from certain sites or for a certain number of views is an easy win for YouTube if/when they decide to do so. Google already owns Checkout, so it should be easy to do after they have the right relationships in place.

I predict that if that limited syndication model is available to the masses, a future media pricing system will allow publishers to offer free video for the first X views and then the videos are turned to private / members only / payment required after they get a certain number of views. All the free views build the perceived social value, while being easy to market since the content is originally free.

Sliding Price Scales Starting at Free

Seth talked about taxing latecomers by making events expensive at the end and cheaper for the first few people. And music is priced this way on Amie Street. It is basically the concept of Piracy is Progressive Taxation flipped on its head - make it free to build awareness until people really value it, then let the irrational herd follow along for the ride.

Word of Mouth is the Best Long-term Marketing Strategy

The free then paid model encourages the creation of remarkable content and ensures artists and authors are paid a fair market value for their best work. And it offers a profound business model strategy because as markets saturate marketing gets more expensive and attention gets more scarce - the easiest way to do marketing is just make it easy to use, consume, and share - and rely on word of mouth to do the marketing. And it is far better than monetizing via advertising because it is more organic, and stems from the web's strengths. As Jakob Nielsen said:

"The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences."

When there is an unlimited amount of competition consumers are far more likely to buy what is already well trusted amongst the community.

This Type of Technology is Easy to do

The cool thing about my current content management system set-up is I can control permissions for any article on this site. It could even be automated for certain classes of information (ie: only pages, only blog posts, only book pages, only on newsletters, only on a subdomain, sitewide, etc.) ... it is entirely flexible.

Limitations

You wouldn't want to bait and switch everything you did or you would build up some serious negative karma and some people may not be willing to link at you, but most people will not care or notice. The attention comes and goes, but the links stick. If you turned 10% to 30% of your well loved featured content into premium content I doubt it would hurt your link building much, although your rear end might get sore from your wallet filling up with cash. :)

Some weekend reading...

Business Strategy

Want a list of the 10,000 most popular subjects on the web? Here is Wikipedia's 10,000 most viewed pages. Courtesy Wiki stats, mentioned in this Search Engine Land article.

Hitwise shows plural keywords drive more traffic to shopping sites than singular terms. Perhaps singular versions tend to be more navigational and brand related, whereas plural terms are more informational and transactional in nature.

Fred Wilson on the self-destructive nature many driven people possess.

Mark Cuban offers a killer quote on the failed branding of newspaper blogs

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business. ... If I worked for the NY Times, or any other media company with any level of brand equity, I would have done everything possible to define the section of our website that offers ongoing as anything other than a blog. I would make up a name. Call it say.....RealTime Reporting.

Indeed it is hard to demonize blogs as being inferior while integrating them into the company under the same name. :)

The Google

Eric Schmidt spoke on video about Google Health about 2 weeks ago. Interesting to think about how Google can provide cloud computing services to any complex or high value vertical (like employment, education, health, financial services) to gain major mindshare and a new revenue stream. And after getting all the publicity Google for some reason took their video down...hmm. Why did they do that?

2007 ad spend shift from old media to Google - hard to imagine this trend will continue at such a rapid clip, but hard to predict what will stop it

Shaking out the bad sites in Google - John Andrews on the delicate balance Google must strike between searcher, advertiser, and publisher:

When a former Google customer (someone who has quit AdWords out of disgust) asks an SEO to help “get free search traffic from Google” it represents a person who is no longer willing or able to play by the established rules. It’s not a sign of criminal intent, mind you, so don’t go hyperbolic on me with the BlackHat WhiteHat stuff. But from a demeanor perspective, that former customer is willing to try things outside of the “let’s do business together” avenue, without telling Google, and recognizing that he is now in competition with Google, his former business partner.

Firefox Extensions

Firefox Ultimate Optimizer - an extension to reduce Firefox memory usage.

Domain look-up extension for Firefox

(Non)Quality Publishing

Harper Collins’ working on coming up with an effective strategy to exploit your children.

Quality Corporate Linkbait

No More Abandoned Carts - even VeriSign is getting into creating quality linkbait. This is what corporate linkbait will look like in a year or two. And like it or not we are probably going to need to be at that level if we want to keep competing.

A year from now heavily advertised linkbait followed by a 301 redirect will be one of the most potent SEO weapons on the market.

I was not going to leak the document publicly until others did and it was cited by other popular sources, but given that SEL blogged about the remote quality rater document, now is a fine time to mention the best weekend reading any SEO could wish for...here is the 43 page confidential Google document in PDF format.

Make sure you download a local archive in case either or both go offline. And if you don't know why the document is so important for SEOs, read my post on spying on Google.

[Update: After I made this post, Google engineers fixed JoeAnt's PageRank. Thanks Google!]

I just noticed that JoeAnt is now a PageRank 3. I have submitted hundreds of sites to hundreds of directories. For sites at the lower end of the quality spectrum (lets just call some of my experience academic) I simply would not submit them to JoeAnt, because I knew they would not list them. Many of those same lower quality sites were accepted in other directories like Business.com and the Yahoo! Directory.

While JoeAnt's editorial guidelines generally enforced higher quality than most directories, here are some of the things that may have hurt them when they were compared to the few general directories which have not had their PageRank scores edited:

• smaller size
• limited partnerships with other businesses
• a lower price-point, which may have lowered the perceived value by the right customers and attracted some of the wrong customers
• a name that sounded playful, rather than being business oriented
• a smaller advertising budget
• limited brand strength

I used to track 100s of general directories, and now I believe about 5 of them are showing their natural PageRank scores. The rest have been hand edited. Many of them were quite abusive and deserved to have their PageRank scores edited, but not JoeAnt, IMHO.

With so many of the clean link sources getting edited by Google, it is getting much harder for small businesses to compete with larger businesses for keywords on the commercial web unless they are ran by publicity whores. I am not sure if Google thinks that enhances information quality or helps mom and pop webmaster provide better services, but I guess we will see in a few years. The ironic part of it all is that if they force everyone to become marketing experts and PR agents to compete, then they undermine the long-term value of (and the need for) their paid search ads.

Why did a Google engineer chose to hand edit JoeAnt's PageRank score when similar directories with lower editorial standards like the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com did not get edited?

I recently switched the navigation on the SEO Training subdomain to be on the left side rather than the right side. The reason for doing this was that it has folding tree navigation based on where you are in the training part of the site, and having the navigation change over on the right side of the page was probably a bit confusing for some users.

But now the navigation on the training part is on the left side and I still have the navigation for the blog part of this site on the right side. Should I move the blog navigation to the left side or no?

Potential rewards:

• makes site look more uniform, which could aid usability and be considered important now that we have 3 major subdomains on the site (community, tools, and training)
• this could also make it easier to run seasonal specials and marketing promotions in the navigation area of the blog

Potential draw backs:

• Having the design look different really helps people see when they are in a different part of the site. Blending it all together may undercut that a bit.
• I am quite used to right rail navigation on this blog...ever since 2003! but maybe sentimental reasons have little value here

What do you think?