Trends to Note in the Search Industry - Popularity as a Commodity?
(Page 4 of 4 )
Of course the problem is worse if you’re popular – or possibly better, if you decide to harness your popularity. You’ve probably heard about PayPerPost and related phenomena, where bloggers are actually paid to write about certain topics. It’s a way to monetize your audience, but many wonder if it’s ethical. Google caused an uproar at one point when it adjusted the PageRanks of many bloggers who were participating in the PPP model.
The idea of paying for an audience built without an advertising context entered new territory recently when Business Week reported that Andrew Baron put his Twitter account up for sale to the highest bidder on eBay. Baron had accumulated about 1,400 friends, who signed up to get his tweets. This is understandable; as the co-founder of online video series Rocketboom, of course his microblogs would generate interest among a certain subset of people.
This was the first time anyone had tried to sell access to their Twitter friends, and naturally it inspired a lot of debate online. It raised privacy and ethical issues, and some were concerned about the precedent it might set. Baron had hoped the move would raise debate; he’d been feeling ambivalent about the technology, and wondered what others thought about it.
If we look past the privacy and ethical issues, it brings us down to the most basic commodity of all: attention. What is worth paying attention to? Search engines are supposed to help us answer this question by sorting and indexing the content of the web so that the items that are most relevant to our queries come up. Nobody pays to use a search engine – but advertisers pay to reach prospects. And many site owners pay to get to the top of the SERPs organically – in time, by learning how to do SEO and adjusting their sites accordingly, or in money, by paying someone else to do it.
The trend I most hope to see in the future is a reduction in cost – the cost in time for someone to find the information they want. Will that necessarily result in an increased cost to the person trying to reach that searcher? In all honesty, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that the search field is a zero-sum game. But I do know that everyone has a finite amount of time. I will pay the most attention to something that promises I will waste less of it. And that’s why the search field, and the ones connected to it, will continue to grow and change.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
