Bleeko vs. AdWords

[sitetruth]

Time Magazine is covering Bleeko this week.

Bleeko now takes the position that if it has too many ads "above the fold", it's toast. The site doesn't appear in search results. Not just further down; the site won't appear at all. Bleeko is getting good press for this.

Public debate is no longer about whether to hammer spam sites. The question now is "how hard". And, of course, "What will Google do?"

We've been doing something like that at SiteTruth. We look for third-party ads, and if we find any, the site is evaluated as "commercial", which means we expect to find a real-world company behind the site. We then check out the real-world company, which is what SiteTruth does. This makes most of the anonymous junk sites, spam blogs, and other "bottom feeders" move down in our results. But we never actually block anybody.

We used to be the hard line on search spam. Bleeko is now hammering harder than we are.

Note that the target of all this hammering is AdWords sites.
Google is getting hit on the AdWords business as a conflict of interest, and in trouble with EU antitrust authorities. It's quite possible that, a year from now, running a business funded by AdWords will be a dead industry.

[expertsguy]

Blekkois a web search engine whose goal is to provide better search results than those offered by Google Search, AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues.

[sitetruth]

AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue.

Actually, Google's search ads (on Google's own result pages) are 70% of revenue, and off-site ads ads (AdSense on third party sites, what used to be DoubleClick, plus display ads and YouTube ads) are about 30%. Google also gets 2-3% of revenue from non-advertising sources.

Business Week questions whether the whole AdSense thing is a win for Google. See "Is DoubleClick Clicking for Google?" (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_12/b4220038620504.htm) They suspect that the ads in commercial content on YouTube are becoming a bigger deal than AdSense ads on random sites. BW questions whether the DoubleClick acquisition was a win, pointing out that it didn't help the stock price. Google stock peaked in 2007. They also point out that AdSense is the root of Google's conflict of interest problem with European antitrust authorities.

On top of this, there's the general observation that clicks received via AdSense aren't worth much and rarely convert to sales.

The point here is that the whole AdSense thing may turn out to be something Google might get rid of.

[AussieWebmaster]

Blekko may be good but just does not have the volume - we can tell the world to go there but in the end they stay at Google and we have to go back and keep playing the Google game

[sitetruth]

Blekko may be good but just does not have the volume - we can tell the world to go there but in the end they stay at Google and we have to go back and keep playing the Google game

(I'm from the metrics and anti-spam side, not the advertising side, so I don't have to play the Google game.)

Much depends on Blekko's business strategy. Today they're tiny. But they may be acquired by a bigger player, like Bing or Facebook or Apple.

Google has to pay Apple $100 million a year to stay on the iPhone. Presumably ads on the iPhone generate more revenue than that. Apple, which prefers to exert control over their user experience, might well want their own search engine. Right now, they are dealing with their main competitor in phone operating systems.

Blekko would be a good fit with Facebook. Both have a "social" mindset. Facebook has a big community of people used to tagging things, which Blekko needs to work well. Facebook also has good info about how influential each user is, so the tagging can be weighted.

Bing, of course, is quite willing to buy market share.