Chris Dixon

Google has created a multibillion-dollar economy based on keywords.  We use keywords to find things and advertisers use keywords to find customers.  As Michael Arrington points out, this is leading to increasing amounts of low quality, keyword-stuffed content. The end result is a very spammy internet. (It was depressing to see Tim Armstrong cite Demand Media, a giant domain-name owner and robotic content factory, as a model for the new AOL.)

Some people hope the social web — link sharing via Twitter, Facebook etc — will save us.  Fred Wilson argues that “social beats search” because it’s harder to game people’s social graph.  Cody Brown tweeted:

On Twitter you have to ‘game’ people, not algorithms. Look how many followers @demandmedia has. A lot less then you guys: @arrington @jason

These are both sound points. Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links people tend to share on social networks – news, blog posts, videos – are in categories Google barely makes money on. (The same point also seems lost on Rupert Murdoch and news organizations who accuse Google of profiting off their misery).

Searches related to news, blog posts, funny videos, etc. are mostly a loss leaders for Google. Google’s real business is selling ads for plane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. (I realize this might be depressing to some internet idealists, but it’s a reality). Online advertising revenue is directly correlated with finding users who have purchasing intent. Google’s true primary competitive threats are product-related sites, especially Amazon. As it gets harder to find a washing machine on Google, people will skip search and go directly to Amazon and other product-related sites.

This is not to say that the links shared on social networks can’t be extremely valuable.  But most likely they will be valuable as critical inputs to better search-ranking algorithms. Cody’s point that it’s harder to game humans than machines is very true, but remember that Google’s algorithm was always meant to be based on human-created links. As the spammers have become more sophisticated, the good guys have come to need new mechanisms to determine which links are from trustworthy humans. Social networks might be those new mechanisms, but that doesn’t mean they’ll displace search as the primary method for navigating the web.

“SEO” (==”Search Engine Optimization”) is a term widely used to mean “getting users to your site via organic search traffic.”  I don’t like the term at all.  For one thing, it’s been frequently associated with illicit techniques like link trading and search engine spamming.  It is also associated with consultants who don’t do much beyond very basic stuff your own developers should be able to do.   But the most pernicious aspect to the phrase is that the word “optimization” suggests that SEO is a finishing touch, something you bolt on, instead of central to the design and development of your site. Unfortunately, I think the term is so widespread that we are stuck with it.

SEO is extremely important because normal users – those who don’t live and breath technology – only type a few of their favorite websites directly into the URL bar and for everything else go to search engines, most likely Google*.  In the 90s, people talked a lot about “home pages” and “site flow.” This matters if you are getting most of your traffic from people typing in your URL directly.  For most startups, however, this isn’t the case, at least for the first few years. Instead, the flow you should be thinking about is users going to Google, typing in a keyphrase and landing on one of your internal pages.

The biggest choice you have to make when approaching SEO is whether you want to be a Google optimist or a Google pessimist**. Being an optimist means trusting that the smart people in the core algorithm team in Mountain View are doing their job well – that, in general, good content rises to the top.

The best way to be a Google optimist is to think of search engines as information marketplaces – matchmakers between users “demanding” information and websites “supplying” it. This means thinking hard about what users are looking for today, what they will be looking for in the future, how they express those intentions through keyphrases, where there are gaps in the supply of that information, and how you can create content and an experience to fill those gaps.

All this said, there does remain a technical, “optimization” side to SEO. Internal URL structure, text on your landing pages, and all those other things discussed by SEO consultants do matter.  Luckily, most good SEO practices are also good UI/UX practices.  Personally I like to do all of these things in house by asking our programmers and designers to include search sites like SEOMoz, Search Engine Land, and Matt Cutts in their daily reading list

* I’m just going to drop the illusion here that most people optimize for anything besides Google.  ComScore says Google has ~70% market share but everyone I know gets >90% of their search traffic from Google.  At any rate, in my experience, if you optimize for Google, Bing/Yahoo will give you SEO love about a 1-6 months later.

** Even if you choose to be a pessimist, I strongly recommend you stay far away from so-called black hat techniques, especially schemes like link trading and paid text ads that are meant to trick crawlers.  Among other things, this can get your site banned for life from Google.

I’ve been trying to set up a “Popular Posts” widget on the sidebar of this blog but somehow repeatedly failed.  So instead I’ll just post them here:

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One of the most popular areas for startups today is “local.”  I probably see a couple of business plans a week that involve local search, local news, local online advertising, etc.

Here’s the biggest challenge with local.  Let’s say you create a great service that users love and it gets popular.  Yelp has done this. Maybe Foursquare, Loopt etc. will do this.  Now you want to make money. It’s very hard to charge users so you want to charge local businesses instead.

The problem is that, for the most part, these local business either don’t think of the web as an important medium or don’t understand how to use it.  Ask you nearest restaurant owner or dry cleaner about online advertising.  They don’t see it as critical and/or are confused about it.  Even Google has barely monetized local.

People who have been successful monetizing local have done it with outbound call centers.   The problem with that approach is it’s expensive.  Even if you succeed in getting local businesses to pay you, it often costs you more to acquire them than you earn over the lifetime of the relationship.

To add insult to injury, local businesses often have very high churn rates.  I have heard that the average is as high as 40%.  Anyone who has done “lifetime customer value analysis” can tell you how that ruins the economics of recurring revenue businesses.

Hopefully this will change in time as local businesses come to see the web as a critical advertising medium and understand how to make it work for them.  But for now, monetizing local is a really tough slog.

* This is what I hear from industry sources.  If readers have better numbers or sources I’d love to hear them.

A commenter on my blog the other day (Tim Ogilvie) mentioned a distinction that I found really interesting between intent generation and intent harvesting.  This distinction is critical for understanding how internet advertising works and why it is broken.  It also helps explain why sites like the newspapers, blogs, and social networks are getting unfairly low advertising revenues.

Today’s link economy is built around purchasing intent harvesting.  (Worse still, it’s all based on last click intent harvesting- but that is for another blog post).  Most of this happens on search engines or through affiliate programs.  Almost no one decides which products to buy based on Google searches or affiliate referrers.  They decide based on content sites – Gizmodo, New York Times, Twitter, etc.  Those sites generate intent, which is the most important part of creating purchasing intent, which is directly correlated to high advertising revenues.

But content sites have no way to track their role in generating purchasing intent.  Often intent generation doesn’t involve a single trackable click.  Even if there were some direct way to measure intent generation, doing so would be seen by many today as a blurring of the the advertising/editorial line.  So content sites are left only with impression-based display ads, haggling over CPMs without a meaningful measurement of their impact on generating purchasing intent.

All of this has caused a massive shift in revenues from the top to the bottom of the purchasing funnel – from intent generators to intent harvesters.  Somehow this needs to get fixed.

A while ago I dug up this quote from Business Week from 2000:

But how will Google ever make money? There’s the rub. The company’s adamant refusal to use banner or other graphical ads eliminates what is the most lucrative income stream for rival search engines. Although Google does have other revenue sources, such as licensing and text-based advertisements, the privately held company’s business remains limited compared with its competitors’.

We now know what people were missing back then and why Google generates such massive revenues from advertising.  The lesson is that the RPMs* of online ads are directly proportional to the degree** to which the user has purchasing intent.  This is why when you search Google for “cameras” you’ll see ads everywhere (and those advertisers are paying high CPCs), but when you search for “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” Google doesn’t even bother to show ads at all.

This is also why Nextag will have revenues this year in the ballpark of Facebook’s revenues, even though Nextag gets a fraction of the visits:

When people talk about search being a great business model (for, say, Twitter), they should distinguish between search with puchasing intent, which is an incredible business model, and search without purchasing intent, which is a terrible one.

This may change as brand advertising moves to the web.  But for now web advertising is dominated by “direct response” ads, and those are all about purchasing intent.

* RPMs = revenue per thousand impressions – can we please agree to start saying RPMs instead of CPMs or eCPMs?  :)

** degree being how close the user is to actually purchasing multiplied by the profit margin on what they are purchasing