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.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
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..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Did you bother to click the link?
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
So what about worthwhile web sites...?
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?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
test
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Thank you
[ link to this | view in chronology ]