More often than not, the topics for publication come together at the last minute. Occasionally, the topic might exist beforehand, although that still doesn’t guarantee it being written before the last minute. This week’s topic falls under both. I suspect, though, that describing any work as the product of procrastination, or last minute, might result in the piece being perceived less favorably than the equivalent piece with no such markers. Given that, pretend this week’s coverage is the result of Ph.D. level work at a prestigious Ivy League University in conjunction with some equally impressive research institute. It deals with an opportunistic site and business model that an increasingly efficient market should quash.
Astute readers will recognize this week’s topic from the following two links that appeared at the end of last week’s Digital Thoughts (since removed):
http://www.8bestsites.com/cells/33/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=crabby+cell&btnG=Search
The first link is a page on a site, the second a search query that led to the aforementioned URL. Given the relative lack of sophistication present on the site, I didn’t think it had popped up on anyone else’s radar. That was until I spoke to fellow contributor Adrian Bye who not only noticed the two links on last week’s column but mentioned he too had been intrigued by them after seeing 8bestsites.com on Alexa’s Movers and Shakers list. Admittedly, I do not check the Movers and Shakers list routinely but was surprised to see 8bestsites.com at number three this week and their corresponding growth figures.
In less than a month, 8bestsites.com has jumped from zero traffic to an Alexa reported almost 15 million page views per day. They have a traffic rank that places 8bestsites higher than sites with seven-figure user bases and those receiving millions in funding. And again, the site has done this all in less than four weeks (according to Alexa). Unlike the sites whose traffic they rival, 8bestsites.com did not achieve this feat organically. It pays for its users, a fact that can be surmised by looking at Alexa provided page view stats. True content sites would mirror more closely the NYTimes.com’s 4.7 or Ask.com’s 4.9 as opposed to Fastclick’s 1.3 or the 1.5 of Quinstreet’s Phoenix lead gen site, uofphx.info. Indeed, 8bestsites.com scores an ad network/lead gen site like 1.5, and for good reason. The site receives the vast majority of its clicks, if not all, from Google AdWords.
Many sites, including lead generation ones, fall into that category, i.e. relying on Google AdWords for traffic. The difference between other ad-as-content sites (e.g. lead gen) and 8bestsites.com is that the latter adds no value to the chain. The notion of an ad network like ValueClicks’ Fastclick, or a lead generation site, is that they provide traffic to clients with whom they have a relationship. Ad networks provide various levels of targeting in addition to reach, and some even offer risk absorption, allowing clients to pay on a CPA basis. Lead generation companies offer outsourced marketing in addition to risk absorption, i.e. they not only accept payment on performance, they also design sites and creatives (at no cost). 8bestsites.com offers none of these; it doesn’t even offer eight sites, let alone “best” ones.
The company, who registered their domain only in February of this year and has kept their WhoIs information private, could, best case (no pun intended) be described as a search refinement firm. They take generic queries and provide users other search results. This happens all the time with vertical engines like Local.com and Shopping.com. Each offers those on Google alternate results, usually layering with it some additional information, such as ratings, for the effort of clicking. These refiners take queries from one source and send it to results from another set of results, but most importantly, the two results sets come from different companies. 8bestsites.com is gaming Google and its advertisers by taking users who searched for one thing on Google and sending them to paid Google results on a different query.
That 8bestsites uses search for traffic poses no problems. Much of the affiliate world survives through paid search. Readers of my previous articles such as Affiliates and Search know I’m bullish on the use of this quasi-outsourced, commission only sales force. That 8bestsites bids on keywords and sends traffic to keyword targeted pages, also sets off alarms. Amazon, eBay, Shopping.com, etc. all do this. What makes 8bestsites.com so unsettling is that their version of affiliate search in many ways robs Peter to pay Paul. The site buys traffic via Google AdWords then sends all of those clicks to a page that lists results from Google AdSense. They do this by bidding on low value words and sending users to a page containing ads for higher paying words that may or may not have relevancy to the initial word.
About the only thing impressive with the secretive affiliate operation is that they’ve been able to scale it to the lengths they have for as long as they have. If they don’t already, I would suggest that AdWords and AdSense require WhoIs information to be public and for their crawlers to scan for content, banning those that have only AdWords from participating. Additionally, Google should cross reference AdSense and AdWords domains and flag those who do both just to make sure. Who knows, perhaps the reason the company hasn’t been caught is that they take search traffic, which is generally higher in quality / intent, and offer it to content advertisers that already expect a lower quality click. Either way, it’s a fascinating example of short term, uni-dimensional arbitrage whose existence will be challenged as systems become more efficient.
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