The landscape of online advertising has changed drastically and so did the search engine optimization all mostly thanks to Google and more precisely it's PageRank algorithm. Advertising, online or offline is a necessary evil. There are very few things in the world that can be sold without advertising. Rest all need some level of promotion. While advertising is also intended to provide awareness, the type of ads that are used today mostly are promotional in nature. A recent article mentioned about how we are only 10yrs into utilizing the post-scarcity digital media. It is true. For the last few years, when the economy was booming, so did pay-per-click advertising and Google's stock. Those days have gone now and with social networking frenzy, there is a lot of page views per day available today than a few years back. As a result, while some types of advertising and websites are seeing their ad revenue declining the others are seeing flat rate or increased revenue. It is yet to be seen whether the context or the behavior, which is a better advertising catalyst.
After click-fraud issues, Google bombing, link buying and selling and pay-per-post, things have improved with both search results and ad click tracking. Ofcourse, this space is like the computer virus industry. Both parties get better at beating the other and at any given time one is better than the other only to see it reversed.
While things are improving for the better, a lot of small players are seeing themselves out of the business due to increased cost of advertising. The merchants are realizing that rather than keep paying to the middle-man for every sale, they can choose to pay a bit to their own consumers to promote their product offerings. Recently I have bought a small electronics gadget from an unknown retailer. I usually buy only from top retailers like Amazon. Only rarely, when I don't find similar offerings on the top retailers do I care to even look at the smaller retailers. And the decision to buy from such small retailers becomes easy if they are part of a shopping network like Yahoo! Shopping network. Similarly, if they allow payment by PayPal, then even better, there is no need to give away the credit card details to a relatively unknown party. It is in this context I want to write my experience with this specific transaction that I am writing this post.
I have placed my transaction and got the order confirmation in my email. It read
"A copy of your order has been included in this message, which will serve as a receipt of your purchase. Want FREE XYZ? Please help us spread the word about our site! It's very expensive to advertise and it drives the cost of our ABC up..you can help. Please post a message on a blog or DEF board about our site and we'll send you a FREE XYZ as a thank you! Just e-mail us with a copy of the link to the post and the address you would like the XYZ shipped to. Also if you tell a friend about us and they place an order that earns a FREE XYZ as well. Just send a quick e-mail with their name and a copy of the address you would like the XYZ shipped to. Thanks for all your help!"
XYZ, ABC and DEF are edited to protect my privacy :). I am also not going to reveal who sent me this email since I want to protect that website's privacy as well. Note that XYZ is an accessory product to ABC.
As you know, people search for everything on the Internet and only ten lucky websites can be on the first page of the results. Rest of the websites have to either advertise, continue to improve their search engine results ranking or fold their business. Advertising, as I mentioned earlier, is becoming more and more expensive. As a result, companies are ready to offer free products for blogging about them or linking them on appropriate websites. Google wants people to report about websites buying and selling links and doing other black-hat SEO techniques. Now, as a webmaster perhaps I should report this website to Google. But as a consumer should I do that? If you read the email carefully, the retailer says that advertising is driving up the cost of the product. And I should agree with this, a lot of times the acquisition cost of a product is much lesser than the selling cost. So, if it helps to promote a product that I bought in the hope that it reduces the cost of it in the long run, what's the harm?
Ofcourse, I want to point out some interesting thoughts on the other side. The email didn't make it clear when I should be posting about them and letting them know. That is, before they ship my main product or anytime? This is because, since it's a physical product, it has to be shipped and shipping costs money. Well, I guess when people are spending $10s of dollars for advertising and buying links, a $3 or $4 dollars shipping expense is no big deal I guess.
I have chosen not to provide a link mainly because I don't have a public blog and also I prefer to not mention what product I bought from whom and when. But all I can say is, the cost of online advertising and the ramifications of PageRank are going to prompt more and more real companies (not those get rich scam websites) to seek out new ways to do their SEO and increase their SERPs.