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Marchex Taking The Business.com Route
from the landgrab dept
The high price tag being bandied about for Business.com is evidence that there's plenty of money in throwing up useless websites that contain little more than advertising. Of course, Business.com doesn't have this space all to itself. Publicly traded Marchex, owner of a prodigious number of domain names, plans to step up its effort at monetizing all the names it owns. Many of its domain names are names like NewYorkDoctors.com, so it's trying to pass itself off as a leading site for local information. It's also making the argument that consumers will find these sites by typing in such addresses in their browser. Obviously, that's not the company's real strategy, it's just what it says to the press. The actual goal, quite obviously, is to rank highly in Google searches for these terms, profiting when a searcher lands on one of their pages and clicks an ad. It's basically the same strategy behind splogs. Of course, while it's seedy, and doesn't add any value to anyone, seeing as more established firms like Yahoo have basically endorsed a similar strategy, you can't really blame Marchex for trying.
Reader Comments
(Flattened / Threaded)
First. Also,what's wrong with the plan as long as it makes you money.
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Let's see - Yahoo thinks it's a good idea; but maybe it isn't.
Or maybe it is.
Sounds like a reasonable idea. Nothing wrong with trying to monetize the domain, and it doesn't sound like it would require much investment either..
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Did you bother to click the link?
Marchex does not simply throw Google advertisements up on websites. Did you actually visit the website, NewYorkDoctors.com? There are no Google ads there. There are reviews of real NY Doctors from real Consumers, and *gasp* local advertisements from actual local NY Doctors. No, really, go take a look for yourself. I'll wait.
Techdirt, I really thought you guys had better reporting standards than this. It's obvious you didn't even bother to do the most basic research here. Way to embarrass yourselves.
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So what about worthwhile web sites...?
Much is being made of sites like Business.com that, some argue, are valueless shells that exploit Adwords and Search Engine Optimization.
So here's a question -- what are some companies out there creating new, quality content?
I think blogs (like this one :) and newspapers are good examples of underappreciated creators of content. Doesn't it seem like in the dot com 1.0, startups were more willing to invest in creating quality original content?
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test
ah1
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Thank you
Thank you. Nathan Orms
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