Re: search engine memberships

Jim,

 Lot of truth in your email, however I think the real reason they are
turning
to pay listings has little to do with spamming, rather the failure of the
search
engine business model whereby advertisers support the search engines.
Income has been declining steadily for the past several years as word gets
out that the click-through rate is not worth what you pay for a banner or to
own a search word for your product.

What else can they do?  They have to support themselves somehow and
banners are going bust.  We have all heard about the layoffs for a while.
After years of banners we have all tuned our eyes to avoid the banner - no
matter how obnoxious they make them.

Unfortunately the one-size-fits-all mentality of having a fixed banner size
along with poor banner design has created this problem.

==========================================
| Paul Wilson
| webgooru(at)gte.net
==========================================

> Now, do they list your pages higher? No. A number of services have
> floated this particular boat in the past and the response from people
> purchasing a consideration for listing and customers is overwhelmingly
> negative. Especially customers want a neutral listing, and specifically
> DO NOT want the results skewed away from potentially meaningful search
> results because one site spends more money than the other. Many Search
> Sites would dearly love to have it be so to enhance revenue stream, but
> other than GoTo.com, the customer response is a rock solid negative.

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