comparison shopping: practical search engines spamming
Comparison shopping networks got sold quite often these days. Kelkoo is now owned by Yahoo, and it's been recently ShopZilla's turn to be sold
for $525 million. ShopZilla is a simplified shopping platform created
by BizRate. People didn't hear much about Shopzilla, because mostly it
apeared in order to double BizRate's Search Engine exposure by
duplicating their offers under a new domain. The cool name, with tekki
flavour, and also the media coverage this pilot project got ensured a
fast market success. There aren't so many players left on the market,
and the open question is if on the longer run, this is a market to stay
in, or not.
If we analyze the business model of these comparison networks, some things start to strike. First, they do generate a lot of traffic, most of it coming from search engines, where they master search engine budgets so that they always stay on top. They have no physical catalog of products; and their categories are driven by the offers they gather. Their original content is minimal, except for eventual final shop reviews. Their skills are in grouping together product offers, and in creating a "fake branding", as all they are are gateways to the real shops. Once they succeed in raising huge monthly traffic numbers, they monetize this traffic via Adsense/eBay type of ads. This business model seems to have worked fine in the past, as final shops didn't really own PPC knowledge, but things start to change on this level quite fast. As this happens, I'd really hate to have spent half a bilion dollars on a short-shot thingy.
Their superior B2B attitude is driven by the market position they have, and this allows them, even on the B2B level, a dialogue that sounds more like "you have to come to us in need", rather than a polite invite-in. In such an environment, I almost start to prefer Google's black-box Froogle: "Froogle does not charge for inclusion in its search results nor accept payment for better placement."'
Bottom line: I'd like to see shopping comparison in a combination of open Adwords and Froogle. Yes, localised or specialised search networks are great, but I no longer like these fat intermediaries. I think the market beeing so smashed into pieces allowed these greedy no-content networks to expand unhealthy, and it's a matter of time until they are labeled as spam.
If we analyze the business model of these comparison networks, some things start to strike. First, they do generate a lot of traffic, most of it coming from search engines, where they master search engine budgets so that they always stay on top. They have no physical catalog of products; and their categories are driven by the offers they gather. Their original content is minimal, except for eventual final shop reviews. Their skills are in grouping together product offers, and in creating a "fake branding", as all they are are gateways to the real shops. Once they succeed in raising huge monthly traffic numbers, they monetize this traffic via Adsense/eBay type of ads. This business model seems to have worked fine in the past, as final shops didn't really own PPC knowledge, but things start to change on this level quite fast. As this happens, I'd really hate to have spent half a bilion dollars on a short-shot thingy.
Their superior B2B attitude is driven by the market position they have, and this allows them, even on the B2B level, a dialogue that sounds more like "you have to come to us in need", rather than a polite invite-in. In such an environment, I almost start to prefer Google's black-box Froogle: "Froogle does not charge for inclusion in its search results nor accept payment for better placement."'
Bottom line: I'd like to see shopping comparison in a combination of open Adwords and Froogle. Yes, localised or specialised search networks are great, but I no longer like these fat intermediaries. I think the market beeing so smashed into pieces allowed these greedy no-content networks to expand unhealthy, and it's a matter of time until they are labeled as spam.
