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As much as I love Google, I’m also a student of history. And history says Don’t count out Microsoft and Bill Gates.
The Wall Street Journal has jumped on a recent comment by Gates. Here’s how it went:
"We’ll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that
ad revenue, we’ll actually share some of it back with the user," said
Mr. Gates, according to a transcript supplied by Microsoft. "The user
essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software
things that they wouldn’t get if they didn’t use that search engine."
Microsoft is in an interesting position of not counting on ad revenue to pay the bills. Google, on the other hand, relies almost exclusively on ad revenue to keep the lights on.
Therefore, if you want to hit Google, hit ‘em where they live. By somehow incentivizing Web users to choose MSN search and Microsoft Web properties via financial gain and / or a suite of freebies, it realistically puts a nice chink in Google’s armor.
Additionally, if MSN finds ways to handsomely reward Webmasters and SEO/M firms by leveraging their search technology products it becomes even more interesting.
Throw in the fact that both Google and Microsoft are busy building a classifieds offering that’s competitive with Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder, etc., then the jobs space becomes particularly interesting.
2006 is shaping up to be a banner year for the two biggest kids on the block, search and online classifieds.
Popularity: 1% [?]
December 14th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
While I admire the creative thinking by Mr. Gates, I question how many advertisers are going to be willing to pay Microsoft the same rate for its incentivized links as they pay to Google for unincentivized links.
We drive a tremendous amount of qualified leads to our site from our affiliate program at Commission Junction http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/affiliateinfo.php . But we automatically refuse to approve any site that provides any type of incentive to its visitors to respond to ads because the quality of those leads if markedly worse than the quality of leads from visitors which did not receive an incentive.
In the old days of the web, traffic was thought to be king. Whichever site had the most eyeballs won. That’s why BlueMountain, a cheesy (no relationship to the owner of this blog, by the way) web site that specialized in on-line greeting cards was sold to Excite for $800 million. No revenues? No problem! We’ve got lots of visitors. In the end, even the dot com owners had to admit that profits did matter, and any sales person will tell you that they make far more money selling to qualified leads than they do in trying to sell to unqualified leads. Incentivized leads, which Mr. Gates seems to be considering, fall squarely into the second group.