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ERGO EGO
State of the cyberweekly address
Media Metrix publishes a list of the top 500 most visited Web sites. Last month, some pages I wrote and designed cracked that vaunted list. Unfortunately, the site was my day-job employer's, not LARGEREGO.
The 500 list is important, because Web sites make their money exclusively through advertising. My first job out of college was for a large advertising agency, when the Internet was still largely free and devoid of ads. There was a concern at the agency about how in Net would impact their business. Radicals, like me, wanted to keep commercials from cyberspace. Capitalists sought ways to exploit the first new media since television.
The advertisers won out, big time. Newspapers charge vaultfuls of money to run an ad, with no guarantee of results. Web advertising is different. Companies pay for space based on how many hits the site receives -- hence the Media Metrix 500 -- and on how often users click through the ads. This was a victory for the advertisers (and their agents), and a blow to media companies.
Smaller special interest sites lucky enough to have ads sometimes encourage their readers to visit their sponsors. Why? If no one visits, the sponsors know, and will withhold future funds.
LARGEREGO, of course, does not have ads, because we do not have the traffic necessary to sell space. Yahoo!, by comparison, had well over 58,000 unique visitors last month, which is roughly 58,000 more than LARGEREGO entertained (or tried to entertain).
Generating traffic is no easy feat. The best way is to have good content that refreshes on a consident basis, which is what LARGEREGO has tried to accomplish. But that's just part of it. You also have to locate new audiences, which takes time, investment capital, and patience. For sites not funded by an AOL or an Amazon, it is extremely difficult to get the word out about your site.
The sure-fire way is with search engines, Yahoo! being the most important. A mention on Yahoo! is worth a thousand hits a month, easy. Unlike most search engines, which data mine the Web for keywords, Yahoo! categorizes each site. This means it takes awhile for your site to be reviewed and added to the database.
Seven months after its launch, LARGEREGO is still not included in the Yahoo! database, despite numerous attempts on my part to "suggest" the site. Yahoo!'s database is far from the exclusive cyber-club it portends to be. Bad links, sites that haven't been updated in months, and wrong information honeycomb the listings. Yet LARGEREGO, for whatever reason, has yet to appear.
For a one-time fee of $199, I could register LARGEREGO as a business, which guarantees a review (but not a link) in seven busines days. For Time Warner, $199 is a drop in the bucket. For small, labor-of-love publications like this one, $199 with no promise of return is a big investment.
And Yahoo! is one of the better search engines in terms of censorship. There is still adult content, although the company has scaled back its commitment to that area. AOL filters its searches through a so-called "veiled garden," which restricts certain sites from ever being seen. AOL calls this a parental control. I call it blatant censorship.
Another problem big businesses had with the Internet was that a site like LARGEREGO and, say, NYTimes.com were the same size -- you pop the URL in the box and up comes the site. Corporations have responded to this by buying as many domain names as possible. Books.com bounces to the Barnes & Noble Web site, and so forth. Search engines register domains, too, and link them to a keyword search page. Check out guns.com for an example.
And then there are the jerks who register domain names for the sake of registering them, in hopes of making a buck. Any word you can think of in the English language is registered by someone. Most are not in use. These people are waiting for some big company to fork over big dollars for the domain name. This was great when that guy from Long Island extorted a hundred thousand bucks from Kroc and company for the mcdonalds.com domain (and gave it to chairty). Now it's just an annoyance.
And so LARGEREGO goes proudly into its eighth month. What began as a vehicle for my own ramblings (the name, incidentally, is an anagram of my own) has posted work by a dozen different writers -- one of whom I have never met. Despite my joking to the contrary, we do have more than seven readers. We're well into double digits now.
This is the beauty of the Internet -- the ability to communicate, instantly, with people all the world over, from Costa Rica to Kiev, Cincinnati to Singapore, Saudi Arabia to San Diego.
Plans for LARGEREGO include a series of music issues, serious reviews of indie music, more graphical content, a LARGEREGO radio network (all Monniker, all the time), world domination, and an advertising blitz.
You caught me -- I'm kidding about the radio network.
Thanks for reading, and if you like what you see, please tell a friend. Word of mouth is the best advertising there is, and that's a good thing, because it's all we've got.
By Greg Olear
051501