Web wombat no longer free

[skarraman]

Looks to me as though Web Wombat has abandoned free listings for Australian and New Zealand sites. They now have what they call an express registration process which cost $40 Australian per year.

My question is do you think this is a good move and is it worth the dollars?

Dave

[Kal]

Originally posted by skarraman
My question is do you think this is a good move and is it worth the dollars?

Dave If this is true, then No and No :). I paid to have a site listed in WebWombat about 6 months ago and I've received exactly 2 referrals since then as a result :rolleyes:.

[Dez]

Everyone has the same basic challenge:

"How do we monetise our site, and quickly.. we just realised we're going broke!"


When I saw this sort of thing becoming all to often the default ( looksmark, inktomi, wombat, etc ) I thought it was strange that they didn't addopt something similar to what I'm implementing:

$free = slow but assured to be included

$pay = quicker and generally used by professionals value adding ( i.e. SEO's )


I think Wombat must be in a tight spot now as they are less than 1% of the Australia search traffic, their engine is suffering a scaling issue ( they are currently only holding around15 million URL's ( searching for "Australia" gives us this from their engine:

Results returned for australia(4335501) - searchtime=0mS, 15159405 aus. pages indexed

And of course, more often than not, there's multiple URL's per site, so the total number of actual "sites" will be many less sites than 15 million of course - particularly when you account for the jugganaughts that the EDU's are of course, and then there's the flood of forums and their dynanic pages or postings that are a nightmare to index * grin *.

Add to that the fact that wombat includes *.nz in their index along with the *.au and then you get the picture that they probably holding around 1.2 million URL's tops for the *.nz ( see the results for search phrase ".nz" which gives us a good indication as wombat scores on the domain name as well as content of course ), so you end up with a guestimation that wombat has around 13.5 million URL's in *.au and around 1.5 URL's tops in *.nz - well - it's a very approximate guestimate ok - don't flame me please.

Results returned for nz(1176863) - searchtime=292mS, 15159405 aus. pages indexed

A daily challenge for the handfull ( say around five or six really ) providers of real search engine ( as apposed to a general script + database such as MySQL and say Gossamer Threads on linux on a desktop pc for example on a permanent modem link ) is to keep the doors open, while providing a good service for $free and yet generate revenues that support keeping the doors open ( duh ) - there's advertising of course, and with keyword targeting and pay per click, advertisers are getting the deal of a life time ( all that free BRANDING for example has a value but hey, you have to compete with sites like yahoo and google who have a glut of unsold inventory and can give it away ) - there's paid support for priority submissions, but thats also chicken feed compared to your monthly running costs for racks of servers indexing gigabytes per hour of data at around $190 per gigabyte ( thanks Tel$tra ) - and the story goes on and on sorry.


The AUD$8.5 million or what ever it was that WebWombat had from investors must have dried up by now, so they handed their site submission traffic over to an oursourced partner to deal with - much cheaper to share the revenue with a company specialising in that core business than to try and write your own from scratch - trust me - I've done it and would not do it again.

Now, from their site submission traffic, which must have been similar to WebSearch's ( something nearing 30,000 hourly submissions!! ), let's say 1% was real ( not spam or non-au or non-nz in wombats case who mix .nz and .au to make their index bigger ) and of that 0.5% let's guestimate that say 1% was willing to pay by credit card when the time came to pay - that's not a lot of money!

i.e. - my experience has been that:

let's assume that you got say 30,000 submissions a day even:

30,000 submissions
1% = 300 real *.au submissions
1% = 3 real submissions willing to pay say $9.99 for 14 day inclusion


That's AUD$27.97 ex GST ( sales tax ) gross

From that you have to take out the bandwidth cost to index those URL's

You get the picutre, even if you were making say $500 a day from paid priority submissions, that's probably not going very far towards your daily running costs.


just some back of the envelope thoughts to share * smile *

Cheers,

Dez

ps: yea, some days you have to ask yourself why you do it * grin *

pps: god forbit I air my own dirty laundry here of course * laugh *

[skarraman]

Nice post Dez!

May as well get that laundry clean here.

personally I have not been by web wombat for quite a while, hopefully there spot isn't too tight as there are not too many well-known search engines/directories that are based in Australia.

Dave:cheers:

[Dez]

Hi "Dave",

> Nice post Dez!

shucks - thanks - I'm trying to bring good in depth discussion and of course reasonable opinion in full to the forum - no post whoring for me * grin *

> May as well get that laundry clean here.

yea - stay tuned for that - I'll get a bit more brave before I spill the beens =;-)

> personally I have not been by web wombat for quite a while, hopefully there
> spot isn't too tight as there are not too many well-known search engines/
> directories that are based in Australia.

hey, don't get me wrong, I like wombat, I've watched them from when the two boys ran a desktop PC with Microsoft's OS/2 operating system and IBM's DB2 database with some pretty nifty code feeding the database and providing search queries, that must have been oh.. way back as far as 1995 even!

Their claim to be the "original" australian search engine is almost right, well, they are one of three of us let's say - if we're going to be honest and fair, but hey, spin doctors and pr agents and marketing and sales all want top ranking right.

I don't want them to die any more than the next guy, or girl, they employ staff, pay tax, and provide pretty good web content and more power to them!

I'd rather yahoo AU or Google AU die first to be honest, Altavista, Google and Yahoo could leave AU and I'd not loose a wink of sleep * larf larf *

Almost nothing those big USA based companies makes here in Australia remains in country outside of a hand ful of basic staff salaries, it's all sucked back into the USA and it's all Aussie dollars and you dont' get any say in it.

<RANT>
So remeber that next time you default to google.com.au or yahoo.com.au or even altavista.com.au or anzwers.com.au or eureka.com.au - they are all backed by USA firms and the revenue from them just gets sucked off shore and does nothing for the local economy in the long run, so click on an Australian search engine next time, even if the results are perhaps not 100% as good * grin *
</RANT>

chortle..

++dez;

ps: yea, I did get something off my chest there - I just lost a decent ad sale to google and yahoo because the fellows site didn't appear in http://WebSearch.COM.AU !! ( and of course when I asked if he's ever submitted it, he said "NO! you should be able to find it yourself!" - yea - right - and I find cold cans of coke in the Nullabour plains for fun too * sigh * ).