Don't Forget to Try FindWhat too... Changing a Name.
FindWhat and Espotting are being renamed Miva. Very rarely do I disagree with AussieWebmaster, but he said:
They have decided to take a completely new name so neither party could feel the upper hand in the relationship. Smart move in my opinion.
Many people in the know still recommended FindWhat. I think about a year ago I remembered Dana Todd saying FindWhat is almost like a tier 1.5 engine instead of a tier two engine (although there has probably been further market consolidation since then).
FindWhat drives nowhere near as much traffic as Google or Yahoo! / Overture, but they still have a few decent partnerships.
There are lots of posts out there telling people they may want to try FindWhat. On the other end of the spectrum you have people saying LookSmart is the worst traffic they have ever bought. Most smaller pay per click search engines could correctly be renamed pay per click fraud search engines.
So you take what is a somewhat clean search engine, which recently cut it's income heavily to get rid of bad partners and you give it a brand new name out in the wild which will make all the old recommending posts sound outdated or incorrect.
Sure FindWhat has had a bit of a bad rap for its stock price getting ahead of itself and the Miva Merchant buyout not leading to as many advertisers as desired, but the stock buyers and market price will eventually follow the value created.
Investors have a longer memory than webmasters, and based on FindWhat's market capitalization not many people are buying it.
Comments
I agree FindWhat is remiss in losing their branding but as far as the European market goes Espotting they control the branding.
I guess they did not want to ruin the marriage by fighting over the name.
I agree a silly move, they could have created Miva as the buy in spot and had FindWhat and Espotting stand as geographically different engines.
As a PPC specialist I felt it helpful to mention that the Internet changes constantly and so does the quality of traffic from any source. While I totally agree that in the past the traffic quality at Looksmart was among the worst, that has changed and Looksmart now produces the highest ROI of any PPC spending I manage.
It is also true that sometimes a particular search engine will drive sales for some advertisers and not others. Testing is always necessary.
As CPC continues to rise at Google and Yahoo I highly recommend all advertisers diversify their traffic sources.
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