The Cost Of NOT Making Money
On The Internet Has Just Gone Up
Part 1
These
are troubling times for the Internet. Investors have
turned away in droves from dot-com businesses. Many
of these dot-coms have gone belly-up and have slid
below the surface of cyberspace. Everyone believed
the hype about the Internet being an untapped gold
mine. Myths upon myths were perpetuated. Now, even
the big names have cash flow problems. Like giant
stars they burned brilliantly at first, surviving
off the cash they were fed but have since collapsed
into black holes, now wanting to survive by sucking
in the wary. They are themselves in meltdown
scenarios.
Notable
among these are the mighty search engines. They
thrived and relied on the billions of dollars being
thrown about by the dot-coms backed by wealthy
investors and the money seemed endless. With
everybody trying to get their share of website
traffic, billions were spent in advertising dollars
making their stock seemingly attractive. The
billions in marketing didn’t work. It left the
debris of failed dot-coms throughout cyberspace. The
dispensers of knowledge failed them, just like they
failed the majority of webmasters who were trying to
get their own fair share of visitor traffic.
How can any Webmaster’s website thrive on
the few measly visitors a day that the search
engines dispense to the lucky ones?
Didn’t
anyone ever stop to think that the form of website
marketing being propagated on the net, is wrong and
is largely to blame for this financial meltdown?
Money was spent in inefficient ways. Most dot-coms
are failing, because the basic premise of Internet
Marketing has been wrong.
The
Internet powers-that-be have behaved like the temple
moneychangers of old. They masked their greed with
falsehoods about Internet Marketing and led the
marketing plans of webmasters astray. They told
everyone that the search engines were everything if
you wanted web traffic. They narrowed everyone’s
thinking to only rely on the search engines. The
basic algorithm of marketing became to trick others
into thinking that their websites had content, even
if they didn’t. Instead of information being
dispensed by the quality of content, it was
dispersed by trickery. The end justified the means.
Websites with magnificent content, that should have
been at the top of the search engines list, didn’t
even appear. What went wrong?
Many
webmasters did what they had to do to, they fought
for the traffic that the search engines re-directed
so feebly. High marketing muckety-mucks had us spend
time on marketing plans that masked the true content
of our websites. Search engines, and the marketing
concepts that evolved relating to such, didn’t
work for the majority of webmasters. Most wasted
months or years of time, which could’ve been spent
productively. Many of us have been misled.
Now,
with belts tightening, the search engines have
started to turn their attentions elsewhere, to other
sources for money. Now, they want us, the
webmasters, to pay for a concept that didn’t work
when it was free. Why would it work now?
As the
search engines lose money, a desperate scramble for
funds has ensued. Most sources have either become
extremely cautious or have simply dried up. The
entire economy of the Internet was based on
self-deception, its stock was overvalued. Now search
engines need funds to survive. Guess how they’re
going to get those funds?
More
and more, Internet search engines have begun the
practice of fee-based submissions and listings. You
can still submit the old way, but if you want to
insure that you’ll be picked up quickly or at all,
it’ll cost you. The charge for this can run as
high as $199 US. In some cases it’s a one-time
fee. Others charge monthly. Some of the more
enterprising companies out there are making some
webmasters bid on their own keywords.
This is
corrupt, being against the very nature of the
Internet. As if that isn’t enough, the way the
search engines work hasn’t really changed. So, you
are basically paying them to be as ineffective as
they’ve always have been and your website still
loses. Here we enter an unusual situation. The way
search engines work isn’t effective, yet we are
being told the only way to get web traffic is to go
through search engines. But now it costs all of us
for the privilege of still getting no traffic. You
can submit to them, you may improve your chances if
you pay, and the search engines still do not
guarantee you’ll get traffic. Isn’t this called
extortion?
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author.
First appeared in http://www.cyber-robotics.com/cgi-bin/creditgo.cgi?webmaster@signmakershop.com
© 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.
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