Ask has removed referral data from many of their ads, leaving advertisers flying blind. Ask.com, which has long been known as one of the leading Google AdWords arbitrage plays, also syndicated their ad feed to the point where Google forced them to turn off syndication. From there Ask has look for new ways to arbitrage search. They have created an automated deals section...

Which has over a million pages indexed in Google!

And the Ask.com search results themselves are a bit rough. Some of them promote featured articles from other IAC parners

Many of them have Ask.com answers in them, which scrapes questions and answers from across the web and wraps them in ads.

And some of the search results have multiple lead generation boxes on them (without any disclosure).

A good chunk of them have Wikipedia listed, but wrapped in ads & hosted by Ask.

A few more vertical ad types and/or general purpose web services (to complement answers, news, local, lead generation, Wikipedia, FreeBases, PPC ads) and a search engine would have no need to send searchers anywhere but to advertisers and itself.

I have no doubt that Ask's search results monetize at a higher rate than Google's, but that aggressive monetization also costs them marketshare. It is a trade off every business faces: maximizing short term yield, while keeping the business healthy and growing in the market.

Given that Google has been testing lead generation AdWords ads, pushing maps hard (while testing ads in the maps results - along with beta tests in big money categories like hotels), paid inclusion in their product search, and product images in the organic search results ... it wouldn't be surprising to see Google clone whatever looks like it is working good for Ask.

But Google will have to move slower on many of these fronts, because if they move too quickly they won't be able to defuse the blowback and anti-trust concerns. Given their recent user privacy snafu, and the current brand ad push where they are now trying to promote the categories they once claimed to have hate, the last thing they want to do is give people more reasons to distrust them and give regulators more reasons to give them another look. So new features launch as a limited beta test / experiment to a subset of users (and in many cases free to advertisers) to slowly release their business plans in a way that does not create too much concern. Small steps bring limited regulatory interference, and by the time concerns are voiced they can say "we have done that for years."

But as the Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) of the web, I wonder if it is a good idea for Google to make blog posts with titles like Now it's easy to switch to Google Apps from Microsoft® Exchange. The broader they spread search, the more likely they are to find their words working against them at some point. They can't claim to be agnostic while self serving ads and writing how to guides on switching away from competitors.

I must confess to being a junky for reading economics and investing sites. A person can't beat the market for a long period of time without having some skills, and so the level of discourse you find on top investing blogs blows other areas out of the water. And sometimes the comments are more quote-worthy and insightful than the blog posts. For instance, "The organisation of society is for one purpose only, to separate as much labor-value from the majority as is possible."

Cynical? Or Realistic?

Some people might look at the above quote and say "well that is cynical" but the truth of a debt based money system means that many people MUST fall behind and be impoverished by debt. How else do you explain most people having nothing saved for retirement going into our jobless recovery, while their children get to eat nearly 6 figures of debt just for being born?

It is fraudulent, but it is how "the system" is set up, and until enough people get outraged by it, it will continue:

That chart of diminishing returns is the window to understanding why humankind is trapped in a central banker debt backed money box. No money for NASA manned space flight - NASA's total budget a puny $18 billion in comparison to the $1.9 Trillion that went to service the bankers last year. One half the schools closing in Kansas City, states whose debts and budget deficits seem insurmountable all pale in comparison to how much money went to service the use of our own money system.

It doesn't have to be like that, in fact it's a ridiculous notion that the people of the United States, or any country, should pay private individuals for the use of their money system. Ridiculous!

It's difficult to see this from inside the box, so let's look at what happened to Iceland to illustrate. The central banks of the world created financial engineered products and brought them to the banks of Iceland. These products created a boom in the amount of credit. Prices of everything rose, and the people of Iceland then had no choice but to go along for the bubble ride. Then with incomes no longer able to service the bubble debt, the bubble collapsed.

To "save the day," the IMF and central bankers around the world rushed in to "rescue" the people, banks, and government of Iceland. They did this by offering loans... documents that create money simply by signing a contract of debt servitude. That contract demanded ownership of Iceland's infrastructure such as their geothermal electrical generating plants. It also demanded the future productivity of the people of Iceland in that they should work and pay high taxes for decades to pay back this "debt." Debt that they did not create or agree to service in the first place!

There were some wise people who saw through this central banker game and started a movement. They DEMANDED that the President of Iceland put the debt servitude to a vote and the people wisely said, "Central Bankers Pound Sand!"

How Structural Accounting Fraud Produces "Wealth"

All around the world banksters make large bets, and lever up on any kind of fraud they can spread to blow huge speculative bubbles. When/while they win, they keep the profits. When they lose (an inevitable consequence of blowing huge economic bubbles), they threaten to destroy the economy if someone else doesn't cover their losses. The correct term to describe the strategy is financial terrorism.

They Don't Make Presidents Like They Used To!

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs" - Thomas Jefferson

Some people thought the current US president would be different than the most recent president. It is the populist angle he based his campaign on. But promptly after entering office he got on his knees for the banking class. "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." - Dick Durbin.

Non-transparency = Fraud

The sad reality is we are headed toward bankruptcy and are implementing exactly the wrong strategies if we have any hope to get out of it. Years after the fraudulent bailouts were passed in the U.S. (against the will of the people) the Federal Reserve is still withholding information and appealing legal requests, and key members are willing to commit perjury to maintain secrecy. When they gave away a half-trillion Dollars to foreign interests they couldn't even share who got the money.

The don't worry, trust us angle doesn't hold water when the mathematical realities of failure hit us all. "Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here" - Gerald O'Driscoll, former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Until the bankers who looted Trillions of Dollars via mortgage fraud see jail time I don't think there is any hope for change. The system is rotten to the core, from the top down.

Moral Hazard in Context

Normally we make laws to prevent such corruption: "In the early years of the London insurance market, it was possible to buy a life insurance policy on a complete stranger. Then insurance companies noticed the high incidence of unexpected homicides among their lives assured, and the concept of insurable interest was devised, codified by the Life Assurance Act of 1774. Today, you can’t buy a life insurance policy unless you can demonstrate some loss by the assured party’s death. The business is safer that way!"

In paying banksters for losing money & relaxing accounting standards (so they can claim false profits while losing money), they are only encouraged to commit more fraud. It's moral hazard writ large.

Stolen vs Earned

Give anyone a trillion Dollars to play the market, backstop the losses on the losing half and let them keep the profits on the winning trades and they will make billions. It's so easy a monkey could do it. And yet it is considered a legitimate trade for bankers to do just that.

Most of these large financial companies are entirely parasitic in their nature, providing society with no real or lasting value - stealing whatever they earn while creating economic distortions that harmfully misallocate capital. Whatever scam they can use to steal your retirement will be deployed: "Quite bluntly, the clueless dolts who allowed [high frequency trading] to occur need to be publicly excoriated, fired from their job as exchange officials, and driven out of town on a rail. Oh, and, all the gains from this organized theft should be clawed back from all the front-running firms that stole this money — THAT’S RIGHT, ITS THEFT — one quarter cent at a time. - Barry Ritholtz"

A top investment bank can give you bogus trading tips on a stock over a half-dozen times in a row - while trading against the (mis)information they share publicly to move the markets. But if someone else trades against that information before they do it is illegal and must be stopped.

How is This Relevant to the Web?

The web shifts the flows of information and finance. The above mention folks in positions of authority don't like that much.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

Popularity is the inequality in supply and demand, equalized by price. The web allows for a direct connection between content creators and their audiences with little to no intermediation:

This isn’t complicated. In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.

The inventor of the web & leaders of other popular internet services think government transparency is important. Many people view access to the WWW as a fundamental human right.

What do elected officials like Jay Rockefeller think? The internet should have never existed.

Numerous governments have aimed at destroying WikiLeaks due to fake security concerns, while some government agencies track social network activity. Lets not forget how many governments are willing to outright lie to their own populous to gain support for bogus wars. War is a racket. It always has been. Just like our banking system!

The freedom and opportunity the web represent can't last long. If it does, many of the above concerns will try to regulate it or (rightfully) find themselves irrelevant.

Where do you place your bets? And who is betting against you?

A few years ago Google's chief economist Hal Varian explained that scale is over-rated:

We're very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There's a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.
...
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it's not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it's the recipes. We think we're where we are today because we've got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Wednesday Google's chief scientist Peter Norvig shared his view:

We don't have better algorithms than anyone else. We just have more data.

And this is why you see so many hucksters hyping trash, committing fraud, scamming users, cutting corners, and working legal loopholes at launch time to try to grow marketshare *at any cost*

Build the scale and you have the cashflow and feedback mechanisms in place to test viral marketing strategies, improve conversion rates, increase real (and perceived) relevancy, and lock in users.

"In a July 19, 2005 e-mail to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote: 'jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.'"
...
"Our dirty little secret... is that we actually just want to sell out quickly," said Karim at one point. In an e-mail, Chen talked about “concentrat[ing] all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” - Ars Technica

Welcome to the exciting world of innovation in online media!

Without brand you have nothing.

With brand even a wounded duck full of unauthorized scraped content like YouTube or Mahalo somehow manages flight, at least for a while. Then you only need to find someone dumb enough to buy the growth story and purchase the bag of smoke before the fire emerges.

Of course people don't have to cut corners, lie, cheat, and steal to build a real business. Those are the strategies employed by people trying to sell value where none exists. You can do just fine by dominating a small niche THEN leveraging data to grow. It is not sexy. You probably can't hype it to the media. It might not lead to an 8 or 9 figure payday. But then you won't have to describe your strategy as "whatever tactics, however evil.”

Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for.

Compete Site Profiles

Here is how compete gets their data.

Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay

It's kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:

• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Average Stay
• Demographic Info
• Link through's to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)

Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.

The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it's info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.

Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed...also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:

You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section

Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it's pretty much industry wide).

Analytics Tools

Compete's second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.

Referral Analytics

This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site's SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.

It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)

In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.

Ranked Lists

Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps

Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)

• Step 1 - unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
• Step 2 - site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
• Step 3 - top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains

Search Analytics

Compete's Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:

• Highly Engaging Keywords - Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
• High Traffic Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
• Paid Keywords
• Natural Keywords
• Engaging Long Tail Keywords - Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
• Enthusiast Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
• Long Tail Keywords
• Total Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from...that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
• Average Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.

You can also compare 2 sites like so:

In Closing

The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who "compete" in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.

Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts.

• Research
• Tracking
• Professional

The countries available within a Keyword Spy account are:

No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings.

Keyword Spy Research Account

Keyword Spy's Research account gives you access to the following data

• PPC Ads (ad copy, the keyword, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, the position last seen of an ad and it's average position, total days seen/days checked. You can also see the ad url and destination url of the ad in addition to other keywords being bid on for that particular ad, as well as an estimated ROI.
• PPC Keywords - showing individual keywords, ROI, search volume, CPC, total profitable ads, affiliate ads on that keyword, days seen, last/first seen
• Organic Keywords - showing individual keywords, position in the SERPS, total search results, estimated CPC, and the URL
• Competitors in PPC and Organic results.
• Sub-domains

The research portion does *not* include organic or PPC overlap coverage, which kind of stinks especially when you consider the price point they charge.

You get access to their Top 1000 sites and keyword reports which can be previewed here.

You can search by keyword as well. A Keyword search will show you:

• PPC Ad Copies with Keyword in them
• Up to 1000 related Keywords
• Misspelled Keywords
• PPC Competitors
• Organic Competitors

You can filter with these metrics but you can only apply 1 filter to the results at a time. Which can be bothersome if you are doing large scale research as they limit the exported data to 50,000 keywords.

Research Account Metrics

• ROI- they compute this as (Days Seen*Percentage Seen/Number of Days Seen since Last Seen). Below is a screen shot of their formula. Again, this is based on the assumption that the PPC advertiser is shrewd and on top of things. I don't particularly care for this metric. ROI to person A can be much different than ROI to person B for a variety of reasons.



• First/Last Seen- Last seen is the last day KS saw the ad (they scan daily) and First Seen shows the first day KS saw the ad (I believe its back to August of 09 as of this writing).
• Profitable Ads - Ads that are profitable based on their internal metrics (like ROI and such) out of total number of ads.
• Affiliate Ads - Ads that are affiliate ads (based on destination url) out of total ads found.

Screen shot of PPC keyword tab showing the above mentioned metrics:

Keyword Spy's Tracking Account

The Tracking account option gives you real time tracking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your PPC and Organic campaigns. This can be useful in checking out your coverage and competition across all three engines. You can also benchmark your data with the competition's scraped data.

Of course, the question is do YOU want your campaigns being monitored by a spy tool that makes its money but showing advertisers their competition's organic and PPC data?? :-)

You can read about more of their tracking/alert/coverage type options here, but outside of tracking and coverage you get:

• Landing Page Intelligence - shows current landing page, ad copy, and destination URL for a particular landing page.



• Organic and PPC overlap data (only between 2 sites) and quite frankly, this is much more research than tracking and should really be included in the research account IMO.
• Benchmarking in PPC/Organic Listings (below is a screen shot of the organic one, they are fairly similar)

So the tracking account is really more for tracking your campaigns across the 3 big PPC engines with some nifty benchmarking and gap analysis features but I don't see it as being overly useful for smaller PPC advertisers, although the coverage options might be a good fit for those in competitive markets across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In general, Spy Tools aren't all that great at looking into smaller sites and markets simply because the resources required to be accurate with somewhat sparse data would be overkill and far to costly. This is why I do not really feel the tracking option is going to be a good fit outside of pretty big PPC advertisers.

Professional Account

The Pro account combines the Research and Tracking account features (up's the overall trackable keywords, export limit, and query limit) plus gives you access to a couple new features:

• Affiliate Intelligence
• Affiliate Reports

Affiliate Intelligence

This tool gives you access to look at products and ads being used by 132 affiliate networks.

You can click through on any network and be shown their offers by URL with searchable affiliate ads for those products.

Affiliate Reports gives you access to big players in the affiliate marketing space such as CJ, LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareAsale, etc. Here you can access top affiliate products and top affiliates by product id and affiliate id respectively. You can also use affiliate product and affiliates id's to search in the destination URL field to try and find additional products/ads they may be promoting.

Keyword Spy mentions something about "Anti-cloaking" technology but they do not elaborate on it. However, color me skeptical that these affiliate options are able to uncover properly cloaked links by top affiliates. So while this may be good for help in looking at potential affiliate products, as well as finding affiliates who do not cloak their links, I'm really not overly impressed with these features but they can be somewhat useful when first starting out.

In Closing

Keyword Spy is a feature rich membership and they have a deep database. For me, if I had to pick just one tool I would opt for either SemRush or SpyFu as both supply solid PPC/SEO competitive intel at a much more reasonable price. Although, if I were a serious PPC player their tracking account might be quite nice (still have reservations about giving a spy tool company my campaign data though). Another great feature for Keyword Spy is their regional databases...they cover many areas missed by some of the other competitive research tools.