Bronte Media

If you live in the Bay Area, SDForum is putting on an interesting one day vertical search event on June 28. Dave of SimplyHired and Jeff of SoftTech Venture Consulting have put together a great list of speakers. Unrelated, I am moderating the panel on Travel Search with my Jupiter hat. If you plan on attending drop me a note and we can meet up. Or drop me a note if you are in the Bay Area and want to meet up - I should be there a day either side of the conference.

I was digging down deeper into how important international revenue is to the search industry and found that Google now separates the UK out from the rest of the world.

Google did about $186m in revenue in the first quarter in the UK, up from $76m in the same period a year ago. Google now derives around 40% of its revenue internationally.

Nearly one half (46%) of incremental revenue comes from overseas (on a year over year basis).

Not to generalize… err.. to grossly generalize.. but search marketers abroad are much less sophisticated in their measurement and bidding upon search marketing. Once they catch up, international will become an even bigger part of Google (and Yahoo).

This is the most under-covered financial trend in the search industry.

The famous quote comes from the movie Glengary Glen Ross when a successful real estate agent is giving a "pep" talk to worse real estate agents who take uninterested people, term them leads and then hassle them.

Now, it seems California has come pretty close to immitating art. From a fascinating LATimes piece on real estate agents:

"The real estate agent waits a maximum of three rings for people to
answer — any more and he figures they’ll be irritated at having to come
to the phone. But even when they pick up, most promptly hang up.
Sometimes they yell at him."

As the price of real estate has risen, the broker fee has stayed fixed at 6%, meaning that each sale is more valuable to the real estate agent. But that has simply meant that a glut of new people are becoming real estate agents. "There are 437,000 agents in California, enough to form the state’s
eighth-largest city. With only 680,000 home sales a year, competition
for listings can be savage."

This is exactly the thing I hope to solve with homethinking.com. Go and read the piece and be disgusted.

I know not many people read this blog but those that do probably know me more than most. That’s why I’d like to ask for your help. First read this: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/eng/73075011.html

Now, if that sounds like you I’d love to hear from you. But in the more likely case you’ll have to rack your brain to think of someone who is exceptionally brilliant, bored with their job and maybe wants to tackle some very interesting search problems. So as a big personal favor to me, I would be forever indebted if you forwarded the link to two or three people you think might fit the bill. You never know what might happen. If they - or you - are interested just drop me a line at niki.scevak at gmail dot com.

Don’t worry about the location for now, if Southwest or Jetblue can get there, that’s so can I. Thanks again.

Deciding upon a name in this day and age is tough. Choosing one is a relatively easier task.

Here is the problem. The cost of domains has dramatically declined over the past few years such that a rather curious opportunity arose for automated robots to mine the keyword inventory systems of Google and Yahoo looking for phrases that satisfied a formula of pricing and volume. If the keywords did, the robot then bought up the keywordPhrase.com and slaps search ads on it. The most famous example is greatbritain.com. Each name doesn’t have to earn a lot of money, just more than the $7/year it costs to maintain it.

A sad consequence means it is tougher to choose a name for new things that is available. Brontemedia.com (this site) is meant as a general holding place for my thoughts and in a corporate sense my interests. The real company name for my new venture I have been negotiating with a chap from Russia in the last month or so to buy. And I finally have.

So in the absence of a rooftop party unveiling the name of my new venture is homethinking.com. It is supposed to connote both the increasingly financially serious nature of real estate decisions but more so a play on the phrase "Home Cooking" because community is an integral component to everything it will do.

But enough about me. I would be curious to see if other people may have had the same problem with domain names, and wanted to pose this question: Were monopoly registers, in fact, good for the Internet?

Marginal Revolution weighs in on the rumored DoJ anti-trust case against the National Association of Realtors.

Aside from the news at hand, they attack the puzzling reality of fixed percentage commissions. Houses in California cost more than houses in Idaho but real estate agents get 6% in both cases. They essentially expend the same amount of effort but one gets paid more than the other. The phenomenon is like tipping a waiter in an expensive restaurant the same 15% as one in a cheap restaurant, even though both do essentially the same thing.

The effect on the real estate industry is that a zoo of real estate agents move to California to compete for a small amount of home sales because they think they can earn more. Even as the price of houses rise in Idaho, more people think about becoming real estate agents and the landscape in every market becomes more competitive. That means that most of the real estate agents time is spent prospecting for customers and less on selling actual homes. That means home sellers and home buyers are presented with an increasing noisy and complex picture when making a decision to engage a real estate agent. Does that sound like a bad situation getting worse?

The WSJ has news that the Department of Justice is poised to launch an anti-trust action against the National Association of Realtors. The crux of the case involves incumbent brokers protecting the industry from new forms of online real estate brokerages who hope to cut costs by taking a lower commission but by getting their agents to sell more houses in less time. The quintessential example of the new guard is ZipRealty.

The price of real estate has risen dramatically over the past decade and has far outpaced gains in the stock market. While the price of houses has gone up, the commission paid to real estate agents has stayed relatively fixed at between five and six percent. That means the real estate agent that home seller’s pick is becoming a larger and larger financial decision.

The anti-trust case is mostly about listings data. The larger brokerages want to restrict access to it and their Multiple Listings Service (MLS). The online brokerages wanted to offer easy access to it, as it is an efficient means of generating leads on the home buyer side.

Inman has a three part series: [Part One | Part Two | Part Three]

Gary over at Search Engine Watch has news of Business.com’s venture into job vertical search, work.com. The release includes this hint of their business model: "Advertisers on Work.com pay only for the candidates that click to their jobs on their website".

Recruitment is a rather deceptive category of vertical search because so much money is spent on recruitment advertising in both newspapers and the Internet. Indeed, online it is the largest category of classifieds advertising, and if you count classifieds as search, the largest category of search marketing overall.

But there is one very subtle difference between jobs and every other category that makes performance marketing tough to overlay. In no other category does the advertiser end up paying the consumer (i.e. if a success the employer ends up paying the employee a salary). Every other category, the consumer ends up buying something from the advertiser (i.e. consumer $ -> advertiser).

This creates slightly different incentives. The incentive of candidates is to apply to positions above and beyond their capabilities. Just try posting a job ad on Monster and seeing the sea of garbage you get back. If you are paying for every one of those clicks - let along resume applications - that can be a problem.

The advertiser wants quality rather than quantity but under a cost per click or performance-based pricing model (save for CPA), the incentive of the jobs vertical search engine is to maximize the number of leads they refer to employers.

Honestly, I don’t have a solution, but the vertical search sites will need to come up with one if they hope to succeed.

I just read Lee Gomes’  WSJ article on the usefulness of the Internet compared to that of the printed yellow pages. He is absolutely right. I agree with his assessment of the problem so much that I am now doing something that will hopefully solve it. I know this teasing is becoming tired, but I need some way of getting more people to read this weblog.

For those without a WSJ subscription, here is the most important part:

"It’s new and improved spam: pseudo-useful pages that are usually just shells for ads.

In many cases, a page might at first glance seem like
a guide to your topic. But after a minute or two, it becomes evident
that the information is virtually useless but is surrounded by an ocean
of ads. In other cases, you find "referral services" — dozens of them
– that promise to put you in touch with reputable contractors. But
these sites inspire little confidence that the contractors deemed
reputable aren’t simply those who have written the Web site operator a
check. (A dead giveaway to these sites, by the way, is their abundant
use of stock photos of improbably attractive, well-dressed people
conferring enthusiastically on the telephone.)"

The WSJ has a good roundup of the challenges facing newspapers, including do-not-call, increasing subscription acquisition costs and meek statements from the heads of the papers suggesting that the declines are deliberate and under their control.

The numbers speak for themselves:

"Daily circulation of American newspapers peaked
in 1984 and had fallen nearly 13% to 55.2 million copies in 2003,
according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the same time,
advertising revenue — adjusted for inflation — has barely budged. In
1985, newspaper advertising, adjusted for inflation, was $43.04
billion, not much less than the $44.94 billion reported in 2003. That’s
just 4.4% real growth over 18 years. During that same period, the gross
domestic product, measured in current dollars, grew 161%."