November 23rd, 2009 // comments (0)

GODIN GETS IT WRONG

Generally a guy with some great points and ideas, Seth Godin wanders way out of his area of expertise here. Brief insight after the cut.

You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Godin mocks Murdoch for a possible deal with Bing! to de-index all content from other search engines and offer it up exclusively to Microsoft’s search engine. Seth thinks webmasters should pay Google for traffic, not the other way around. But his logic is flawed; Traffic doesn’t convert to cash so easily when your product is news and ad markets are over-saturated.

This is actually a master stroke from Murdoch. If he only gets the amount of money he would have from the incoming Google traffic, he breaks even. But Microsoft has the most to gain here and they’ll probably give him a solid deal. The fact is, you don’t build a loyal audience out of the 25% of your traffic that comes from search engines. These people are from all over creation and converting them to something useful for you and your brand is much more difficult that Godin pretends.

I like the guy and the way he thinks. He’s just dead wrong here.

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• November 24, 2009 -- RE: GODIN GETS IT WRONG