Would this be considered a paid link? Where is the line drawn?

Nice business model too. Are those arrows pointing at the ads legit? How about the request to support our sponsors?

Get a few hundred million in VC funding, buy some old domains. Fill the domain with user generated content. Place a thin layer of link schemes and please click ads on the top. Web 3.0...Wow. Exciting times.

Also, learn how to rent millions of links in a Google friendly way.

The WSJ let the "our content will be free" story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:

Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."

The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.

Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:

• there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
• the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
• Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
• Free content cuts marketing costs to ~ $0.
• People hate micropayments.
• Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
• The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.

Central hubs on the web fight off manipulation to keep their status and profit margins in tact. A side effect of this war on control over information access is the butchering of the English language.

Digg is Illegal?

Digg's CEO Jay Adelson said:

I'm sure there could be blackmailers out there. We absolutely know that every single day, people try to game our system. Users are involved in illegal or inappropriate activities all the time. They try to set up fake accounts to promote a story. The thing is, we make changes to our algorithm on a regular basis. We plan for that.

Notice how he put illegal and inappropriate right next to each other, as to equate them. This comes from the same company that published this:

We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Sure you can buy votes on Digg, and they arbitrarily ban websites. But does controlling a bunch of worthless traffic give them the right to butcher language to push their business objectives?

Google is Illicit?

Michael Gray's continued debate about the war on links spurred on additional conversation.

Why is the Yahoo! Directory Considered a Legitimate Link Buy?

In addition to what Jim said, I also believe the following play a role:

• They predate Google.
• Google needs some sort of baseline.
• The directory business model is horrifically inefficient and poses no risk to Google's market dominence. (Yahoo! demoted it in favor of Yahoo! Answers. Even the Google Directory, a DMOZ clone, has a higher PageRank than the Yahoo! Directory does.)
• Few other sites are comparable to the Yahoo! Directory (especially after the Google directory purge of 2007), so it is not a technique that can't be easily and profitably be replicated like paying for reviews.

The truth is independent link sellers often exercise more control than directory editors do.

The entire Business.com directory of over 65,000 categories is managed by 6 editors (source). How could they possibly review stuff as well as you or I do? They can't. But if we all do our business in a direct to direct exchange fashion the central networks and search engines do not get a cut of the action.

Why Google is Different than Digg

Unlike Digg users looking to waste time, searchers have real targeted intent and real value. In response to Michael Gray's post Danny Sullivan said:

But if he wants to stand up to Google, take the lead and block him from crawling his site -- and encourage others to do the same. ... No one has a right to Google traffic. Follow the rules, as stupid as they are, if you want it. If don't like the rules, sure, complain about them -- but don't argue they're robbing you of anything that is supposedly "yours."

But unplugging from Google is not as simple as blocking them in robots.txt. They can still pay others to steal your work and wrap it in their ads.

They change the guidelines on an as needed basis (use nofollow or else), apply them unevenly (why is TLA penalized when TextLinkBrokers still ranks?), and if they don't like you they can penalize other businesses associated with you.

Michael pointed out that the Google's Webmaster Guidelines butcher the word illicit. In response Danny wrote:

Michael, illicit as used on the Google Webmaster Guildelines page is defined by however Google wants to define it -- in that case, doing stuff against the guidelines.

When the networks screw people over it is the fault of "users" or "the algorithm," but when the central networks do not like what we do we are "criminals performing illicit acts."

You know what is illicit? Adultery. And Google ads recommend it.

Recently Google has been more than fair to me, but if they want to use the language they are using to try to control others, they need to clean up their ad network. Just because an ad has a high CPC and gets a high CTR does not mean that it is not immoral or illegal. Plenty of people commit crime.

High Value Keyword List Data for YOUR Business

This video is about more than just generating keywords for AdSense sites, it is about finding the most valuable keywords for any business. But most the people searching for top paying keyword lists are looking for AdSense keyword lists. I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).

Discover Your Top Keywords

In this video I explain...

• Why most top paying AdSense keyword lists are worthless. (It's not just because AdSense cannibalizes publishing business models and AdSense earnings are dropping).
• how to quickly create a keyword list using data from search engines, public keyword suggestion tools, and competitive research tools. (you could also use data from your analytics tools too)
• how to filter a keyword list to find out which keywords are the most profitable using Microsoft's Ad Intelligence tool and the Google Traffic Estimator

When you evaluate the actual opportunity cost of business opportunities, most client relationships, equity stake deals, and other partnership opportunities fall short of what you could do on your own. The only ways it works out is if their is a symbiotic relationship through different approaches that balance out each other's shortcomings, or if you can learn something from working with them.

Problems With Many Opportunities

• Unwilling Clients: Many clients are unwilling to change their sites to add unique content or value to them.
• If you have a thin affiliate site Google told you what they wanted years ago.
• Andy Hagans and SugarRae followed up with great tips.
• If you own the site you can do whatever you want with it. Not so with client sites.
• Employee / Slave Wage: Work for equity stake partnerships where the partner provides the domain name and you do everything else are both lopsided and useless.
• At any time the partner with lots of domains can decide to screw up the project you are working on together, and has 0 time investment and limited capital risk by only putting one or a few domains into the partnership.
• 6 months or a year after working with you they can take all the knowledge you spent years learning and apply it to their more valuable names while giving you nothing for teaching them everything you know. They were not teaching you how to buy domains why they were accumulating them for years. Why give all that knowledge up for a slice of a slice of a slice?
• Buy an alternative average quality domain and keep all the equity. Build it up with sweat equity and learn your market. Buy great domain names when you can afford them.
• Follow the Crowd: Many marketers try to saturate a field with affiliates marketing their products and teach affiliates how to market that same product as a piece of the product that is sold. The margins on those opportunities get compressed with each additional competitor you sell that product to.
• Many marketers show stats out of context, use meaningless sample sizes, and/or lie about the hows and whys.
• People hype opportunities long after they no longer exist because they are addicted to the easy profits still rolling in from old work building out an affiliate network.

Are You Moving Up the Value Chain?

I am not against any of the above models as a starting point, as everyone has to start from somewhere. But if you....

• love business
• love what you are doing
• want to create a sustainable business
• can afford short term risk for long term stability

...you need to build equity from your work, and have a controlling stake in the outcome. If it sounds to risky to change then at least start building a site for yourself in your spare time.

What If? ...

Sure it would have been nice to have been an early programmer at Google, but for every Google there are thousands of market losers. Investing in yourself is the best investment you can ever make, and you one have to be right once.

What happened if you invested in Google a month ago? It seems those who just bought into that market hype just lost a couple dollars. Will Google go back up? Most likely. Will they increase in value at a rate as quickly as you can? Not likely.