Past the Golden Age of SEO
@cdixon on the TripAdvisor IPO:
Big win for the “golden age of SEO”. By which I’m referring to roughly 2001-2008 when “demand” for content (people typing in search queries) far outpaced supply (good content). Companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor (along with Wikipedia, IMDB, etc) grew huge during this period, almost entirely through SEO. They did this by getting highly defensible flywheels spinning where more content meant more SEO which meant more users which meant more content. It is now far more difficult to grow a startup primarily through SEO. Almost all monetizable search categories have vast excesses of SEOd content. Moreover, Google is creating their own content (e.g. Google Places) which, at least at times, they have favored in their search results.
Have heard Google’s big vision is 100% monetization on categories in which there is an “intermediary”. For example, Kayak (and many others) for travel, Nextag for shopping.
Google is no longer happy being just a CPC platform — they want to be in the transaction and improve its CPA model. I suppose being closer to the actual transaction across the board is a better economic proposition. Is it always the case that CPA > CPC > CPM?
