From SiliconValleyWatcher:
What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati's expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals. Mr Whitmore barely mentioned his company, and I didn't pitch anything, maybe I should have :-)
But I did get an interesting peak into the world of "selling the blogosphere" and how there is a large and growing number of companies, such as Technorati, that would like to make a lot of money from the work of millions of bloggers.
But here's a question nobody is asking so far: Will Technorati offer bloggers a cut of the cash too?
Posted by jzawodn at July 11, 2005 08:05 AM
I guess I don't understand - maybe I'm missing the point here. Does Google or Yahoo offer any of the cash they make to the people whose pages they store in their search indexes?
Surely Technorati are already "paying back" bloggers by offering them a range of free services.
>Does Google or Yahoo offer any of the cash they make to the people whose pages they store in their search indexes?
You beat me to the question.
Jeremy, will Yahoo start paying me every time a user clicks on my web site as the results of a Yahoo search? When will Yahoo start offering web masters a cut of the cash?
In the short term, Technorati needs to address performance issues. They appear to be having a difficult time keeping up with the ever growing blogosphere.
if I write about Nike, and Technorati connects my blog with Nike's PR people, then they have done better for me than all the teenage kids Google and Yahoo sends my way who mistakenly ask for free sneakers in my comment section.
Technorati also has to work harder on excluding spam. The number of fake blogs containing automatically generated snippets of news articles plus advertising is increasing astronomically. I've especially noticed the trash clogging up the search results for vaguely health-related terms, but I'm sure there are plenty of other areas.
One could certainly argue that Technorati (or Google, or Yahoo) trade 'free' services in return for the cash they make. But I don't usually agree to trades without knowing the value of what I'm trading.
Why doesn't Technorati (or Google, or Yahoo) just come out and tell me how much my listing is worth to them, and then I'll decide if the services they provide in return are worth that much to me?
Yes, I was striked by that in my first days on the net. People waste their time and money on writing quality content and making sure it appears in search results only for search engine providers to get richer. Then I got used to the "fact".
I'm fairly certain that one site's results are worth mere fractions of a cent to the search engines. An incredibly rough, naive way to find how much their referrals are worth to you: Find the percentage of your traffic referred by that search engine for a given period. Take that percentage of your revenue from the same period. Then find the percentage of your traffic caused by their crawls. Take that percentage of your bandwidth/hosting costs from the same period, then subtract that from their share of the revenue. That's oversimplified; it assumes that the percentage of conversions is going to be the same as percentage of referrals, but it uses numbers anyone should have at their disposal without fancy stats packages like Urchin.
The technologies that aggregate content and make it searchable are the ones who make the money. That's how it has always been. I'm not saying it's right because it's "always been" that way, but both you and I know that at the end of the day, it's not Technorati's responsibility to make sure these bloggers get paid. Leave that to Battelle's FM Publishing and Weblogs Inc. to attract advertisers. And by the way, Technorati is helping them do that, so I certainly don't care if Technorati would pay me or not. As long as I can use their system to get more eyeballs on my site for free, I'm a happy man.
I don't see any harm in Technorati providing data services to corporations. As mentioned before, the data is public and we get free services. Well,sometimes we get free services--Technorati needs to spend more time on tech and a little less on marketing.
What concerns is the focus on those services.
"Well, Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the "wrong" message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate "SWAT" team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers."
This puts companies and bloggers into a confrontational relationship. Is this the message Technorati wants to send via its marketing? It's a lousy message.
I agree that they bring us traffic, still, we make much less (if at all) than they do.
