The Blend - 2008 Online Publishing Business Strategy

John Battelle riffs on how Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL are screwing up by following in Google's footsteps trying to create huge ad platforms, while ignoring their brand ad strength. And AdAge asks if we may one day see a web free of push display ads.

If traditional ads become less effective, we will still end up trusting ads that are links that look just like content. How to article linkbait, user generated content, and 100% blended affiliate links now make up the Mahalo business model. Which is really no different than the affiliate marketing Jason despises. That really puts a new perspective on somebody lashing out at SEOs and affiliate marketers before creating something that aspires to be more polluted.

[UPDATE: Yahoo! Search also is getting into the blend more aggressively, allowing brand advertisers to drive potential customers to branded Yahoo! Search results. More information on Search Engine Land, and an example Y! search for Honda here.]

Published: March 20, 2008 by Aaron Wall in publishing & media

Comments

markus941
March 20, 2008 - 9:50pm

That's a huge shift for Mahalo. Google may not like it and if they don't, then what?

http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Search?search=hypocrisy&go=Web+Search

Cavan Moon
March 20, 2008 - 10:28pm

Per Mahalo's FAQ page:

"Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links."

"Spam free"...I guess this depends on your interpretation of blended affiliate advertising throughout the site.

"Great links"...see above

"Popular search terms"...more like popular commercial search terms. I picked out a couple of names from Wikipedia's top 200 searches on http://stats.grok.se/. Rosa Parks is nowhere to be found, but at least Mahalo's got plenty of info on Kimbo Slice. ;)

Thanks for mention Aaron!

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