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Subject:RE: Death knell for quality content? From:"Lauren" <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:28:35 -0700
> From: Gene Kim-Eng
> That's quite possible. Just for laughs I took a look, and It's hard
> to tell exactly what their business model is, since at this
> point there
> don't seem to be many ads on it despite its prominent "advertise
> with us."
What do you mean there aren't many ads? Each article I saw had two Google
ad blocks (Google's limit is three), one inline doubleclick ad, an
advertising.com ad, and a paid, "partners" ad. Each page, or article,
produces a new set of ads based on keywords. That's a *lot* of ads.
> I would guess, though, that search engine results are
> indeed the way most hits happen, since it's very hard to find
> anything by clicking through the site itself. I got the impression
> that I was looking at an electronic version of a Pennysaver flyer.
Maybe it's a generation thing, but the site is easy to navigate because of
its very common design. Category links (Channels on Helium and other sites)
and popular articles (Highlights on Helium) on the front page are quite
popular on blogs and they are in use here. This is the format that a lot of
people like to see as it is the same format in most blog themes. The only
difference between web sites in most cases is the arrangement of the
widgets.
This simple business model is easy to derive and it is very popular. Post
too much information as articles, provide fresh information everyday,
compartmentalize the articles in clear categories, show the most popular
articles on top, provide rss feeds, load each page with ads, and hope that
one day you will be mentioned here, http://www.johnchow.com/the-internets-biggest-google-whores/.
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