Being a (Near) Monopoly is Expensive

The more I think about it the more I realize why Google doesn't like the various flavors of paid links. It has nothing to do with organic search relevancy. The problem is that Google wants to broker all ad deals, and many forms of paid links are more efficient than AdWords is. If that news gets out, AdWords and Google crumble.
DoubleClick was the wrong model until Google bought them. But smart marketers are not trying to waste millions of dollars on overpriced brand ads.

Google Doesn't Sell Social Ads

If you are buying ads on Google you are trying to reach everyone searching for a keyword. If you buy contextual ads you are trusting relevancy matching algorithms. Those used to be the standard, but now there are far more efficient ways to reach early adopters. Social influence is far more important than most people give it credit for.

Content as Ads & Cheap Social Ads

People game Digg, draft stories for specific trusted editors, suggest stories to popular blogs, buy reviews on blogs, create products or ideas with marketing baked in, link nepotistically, etc. There are a lot of cheap and affordable ways to reach early adopters.

Editorial and social relationships have far more value than Google realize, and Matt Cutts's recent outbursts are just a hint at how Google is losing their dominant control over the web. And they deserve to, because...

The Web Doesn't Want to be Controlled

Sure Google likes link baiting today, but that is the next paid link. Google is backing themselves into a corner, destroying each signal of quality they once trusted, until one day the web is a piece of junk or Google is no longer relevant.

Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.

While Search Submit Pro allows you to have more control over listings and is sold on a costs a per click basis, their Search Submit Basic allows you to submit URLs for $49 per year per URL.

In the past Search Submit Basic was called Search Submit Express. It charged a flat inclusion price and sold clicks on CPC basis. Here is an Archive.org link to the old program.

If you have launched a new site and are not getting much Yahoo! traffic, submitting a few of your highest value pages is a good call. If you have key deep high value pages that are not staying indexed in Yahoo! this program also makes sense.

A couple friends recently recommended watching Idiocracy. It is equally funny and disturbing, especially when you consider how our media consumption habits have shifted. Small isolated chunks pretend to be valuable information, but when placed outside of useful context, typically in ordered lists of factoids, they have much more marketing pull than they have actionable value. Some of my better posts go without comment, while some of my lists get thousands of backlinks.

Some people have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of readers. Some people have millions of inbound links or MySpace friends. Virtually all of it is recycled content and recycled marketing in a fight for mindshare. The struggle for marketing anything beyond thinly disguised self promotion is to be able to add context, all while time starved people learn to hate and reject it, as they rush off to blog the same story before you do.

Via Marketing Pilgrim, Google now offers a Placement Performance report, which shows what pages and sites your content ads are displayed on, and which ones are converting. Here are tips Google offers on how to use this data:

• If your goal is to increase conversions such as purchases, page views, sign-ups or leads through your ads, reassess how you're tracking your conversions. Make sure you've implemented conversion tracking so you can understand how individual sites are converting for you. Please note: A low CTR reading on a site does not mean your ads are not performing well. This is because users behave differently on content pages than they do on search sites.

• Use the site exclusion tool to exclude sites that are not converting for your campaign.
  Refine your targeting. If you find that your ads are not showing up on sites with a particular theme that you do not find relevant, try using negative keywords

• Adjust your bids. Enabling our content bidding feature will allow you to bid separately for the content network. Learn more.
• Identify sites that are converting particularly well for your campaign and take steps to increase your exposure on those sites. We recommend enabling our content bidding feature to bid more aggressively on those sites, or targeting them through a site-targeted campaign. Please note that site targeting utilizes cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding.

While those tips generally revolve around track your ads and spend more, they could be a bit more altruistic and useful. Thus, here are my tips on how I might use the data:

• If you are using CPM site targeting on a large site, but find only a few pages convert, consider just targeting those few pages.

• Find sources to buy ads from directly, and buy all their ad inventory. Maybe you can even broker a custom ad deal involving presell pages.
• Find link sources...if they are already selling AdSense it doesn't take much more work to buy ads directly, especially if they are a smaller player and are not making much from AdSense.
• View what TYPES of content converts and search for other content that matches that intent which you may want to advertise on.
• View page content to see what keyword phrases the converting content covers. Create content covering the same keyword groups.

It is easy to evangelize some ideas.

• Here is another meme on why blogging is good and important.

• Education is great. Everyone should have a chance to be formally educated.
• I love my God and country. etc.

These types of campaigns work so well because we all need to believe in something, and there are cascading layers of fraud baked into society telling people what to believe in. In some cases the fraud is little white lies, while in other instances powerful institutions collude with other powerful institutions to keep their plot in tact. Rich Skrenta recently pointed to an excellent Mark Tarver article about college titled Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University :

Which brings us to the students - the supposed beneficiaries of this new egalitarianism. For them, the new system has brought debt and degree inflation, since the new degrees are undoubtedly not equivalent to the pre-1990 degrees as measures of ability and learning. They pay more for less quality than their mothers and fathers received and they have little contact with the lecturers because the lecturers are too busy filling out forms and chasing money. This is the Cultural Revolution of the new century and it has left the same desolation behind it.

The situation in the United States isn't much better either. Universities are actively and openly engaged in fraud:

So far, six schools -- the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Syracuse University, Fordham University, Long Island University and St. John's University -- have agreed to reimburse students a total of $3.27 million for inflated loan prices caused by revenue sharing agreements, Cuomo said. The schools will return money to students who took out loans during the time the revenue sharing agreement was in effect. Students will be refunded based on the amount they were loaned.

And that doesn't even take into account that at some univeristies 96% of enrolled students never get a degree.

This is why I don't like automation and efficiency when pulled out of context. Eventually efficiency for one party comes at the expense of defrauding anther. If so many schools are actively involved in fraud, how much can a degree be worth? How many other businesses operate with large subsidized hidden costs?

Google sells virtually unmarked ads and The WSJ sells advertorials. And nobody knows why the media is broken. It's not just the internet.

When cash and influence rich industry leaders push things so far it forces some people to commit fraud just to keep pace with the marketplace. Yet nobody seems to connect the dots. Why?