Overture Australia expects to secure 80% of local market

[Kal]

According to this article (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8738683%5E15336%5E%5Enbv%5E15306%2D15318,00.html) the newly opened Overture Australia expects to reach 80% of the Aussie market. A little over-ambitious? I think so!

[medkraft]

Overture Australia expects to reach 80% of the Aussie market.

It is possible if they use Enron math to come up with the final numbers. :)

However, since they're charging different prices for certain keyword phrases, it will take them a while longer to get there. Rather than wait for the market to increase the price, they're doing it artificially. This practice will make it more difficult for them to get advertisers on board as quickly as they'd like.

[Emancipator]

ROFL! enron math, i love it!

[ihelpyou]

Well don't forget Kal, I'm very sure those numbers include the reach of the Gator Corp. as well. Overture and Gator SCUMware are bed buddies, so let's not forget that fact. :)

[Kal]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
Overture and Gator SCUMware are bed buddies, so let's not forget that fact. :) I'll NEVER forget that fact. It's why I cancelled all my Overture accounts and will NOT do business with them again, even now they have opened in one of my prime target markets :mad:

[Emancipator]

I never give Gator or Overture the time of day. what is the connection between the two and what is the practice they are doing that is upsetting?

[Kal]

Overture signed a deal with Gator for the distribution of their paid search results. When questioned about the deal and experiencing a mass walkout by many of their smaller clients, Overture chose to bury their heads in the sand and stick with the Gator deal, turning their back on their complaining clients in the process. I can't find the press release about the deal right now, but if you do a search in here you might find it.

[Emancipator]

Thanks for that bit of information. nothing like making a deal with the devil.

[medkraft]

Emancipator, if you're doing work for other clients it's best to inform them of the relationship between Oveture and Gain and let them decide. In my experience, the amount of traffic provided by Gator is failry small and only a tiny part of the overall traffic delivered by Overture. It seems silly to skip the opportunity for qualified traffic from MSN and Yahoo because of a few extra clicks from Gator, especially if the overall ROI in good.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like the opportunity to turn off Gator distribution (and I believe they will eventually have to offer such as service), but as long as the traffic is converting, my clients are a happy.

[Emancipator]

I never tell my clients what to do when it comes to PPC. I let them make their decision based on a more expert opinion. My forte is code and webdev, seo is but a hobby that I happen to do well at.

I totally agree with your sentiments.

[medkraft]

Seo is but a hobby that I happen to do well at.

Sounds like a business opportunity to me.

Cheers... Tom

[Dez]

Kal,

interestingly enough I'd say it's already happened, Google might have had an interesting search engine technology ( software more than anything - but FAST and their ASIC based search beat that hands down ), but the fact remains that Overture have always been the smarter company when it comes to business development and capacity to sell.

Try dealing with Google and Overture to buy an actual ad campaign, not just one pissy little US$100 ad run, but thousands, or in one recent project of mine, hundreds of thousands, and then see the difference.

Google were "bamboozeled" ( love that word ) just trying to understand why I wasn't going to spend that sort of money through AdWords using my AMEX ( oh, even though Google is an American company based in the USA, they don't take AMEX, figure that one out! ).

Overture not only dealt with me without breaking stride or blinking, but won my ongoing business, unfortunately we had to fire Google.

I'd be amazed if Overture now doesn't own around 95% it not more to be honest.

Google is so yesterday that it's not funny, and they are more and more yesterday as Yahoo sorts out the scaling issues with their Inktomi engine using their expereince in now owning both FAST ( alltheweb.com ) and Altavista, both of which are monster engines and very smart.

And then there's the fact that Yahoo are actively supporing open source projects such as Nutch which they are gaining great experience from too - were is Google in open source? Nowhere.

Google's built on open source but you don't see them giving any of it back even though the open source mandate is all about just that!

For me, Overture earned their position, Google tripped over it.

And like most things, if you didn't earn it, you will easily let it go or loose it.

Dez 2.0


Originally posted by Kal
According to this article (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8738683%5E15336%5E%5Enbv%5E15306%2D15318,00.html) the newly opened Overture Australia expects to reach 80% of the Aussie market. A little over-ambitious? I think so!

[projectphp]

I'd be amazed if Overture now doesn't own around 95% it not more to be honest.
Well, its 5 months since kal started the thread, and Google accoutns for 50%+ of CPC generated clicks, and 70% plus of total clicks for the sites I have access to figures for.

Overture probably has 80%+ of market sahre for the (insert dodgy figure) monthly unique searchers (which is what MSN always uses).

Google's built on open source but you don't see them giving any of it back even though the open source mandate is all about just that!
That's neither tru nor fair. Open source never dictates how one gives back, or indeed that you even do. googe have given back heaps: The google API, which is massive for so many sites, the Linux (http://www.google.com/linux) and BSD (http://www.google.com/bsd) search options, as well as employing many of the industry's brightest minds. In fact, Google have identified this as a area in which they can improve, and have made waves lately about how they can give more back, which is great news for OSS advocates.

[Dez]

Overture actually don't care about the actual "search user" market, they want to own the advertising market. Their 80% of the search market "figure" was not about taking Google's supposed #2 ranking ( against Yahoo's #1 ), they [ overture ] are pushing to be THE largest paid listing provider, revenue that is.

As far as I can tell, their attitude is "who cares who owns the biggest search engine.. it's the company selling the most paid advertising / listings that wins.."

as for Open Source, you're right, there's no specific "mandate" that thou shalt givest back XYZ, but it does imply that if you change something, you MUST give back the changes and source..

Google have practically re-written the GNU/Linux platform to suit their needs for load balancing, clustering, shared virtual filesystems, and search, and where's the code for that? nada!

And their API, please, I don't think an API is "giving back to the open source community" frankly.

I don't hate Google exclusively for this by the way, any one or company using open source who does nothing in return is, in my opinion a blood sucking leach.. but that's just my "I pay legit sponsorship to almost every project I use code from almost on a monthly basis" point of view..

Dez 2.0

PS: I hate governments more by the way, starting with the USA! You can't have equal opportunity and fair play laws if you don't first live by then, and if you take prisoners of war when there's no war, that's illegal, if you don't try them in a reasonable period of time, that's illegal, it's a crime of war, and if you torture them in times of peace, thats a war crime! See, I have lots of things that give me the shits * grin * - Most all is my pet peve that peopel call Linux an operating system, that's just funny!


Originally posted by projectphp
Well, its 5 months since kal started the thread, and Google accoutns for 50%+ of CPC generated clicks, and 70% plus of total clicks for the sites I have access to figures for.

Overture probably has 80%+ of market sahre for the (insert dodgy figure) monthly unique searchers (which is what MSN always uses).


That's neither tru nor fair. Open source never dictates how one gives back, or indeed that you even do. googe have given back heaps: The google API, which is massive for so many sites, the Linux (http://www.google.com/linux) and BSD (http://www.google.com/bsd) search options, as well as employing many of the industry's brightest minds. In fact, Google have identified this as a area in which they can improve, and have made waves lately about how they can give more back, which is great news for OSS advocates.

[projectphp]

Their 80% of the search market "figure" was not about taking Google's supposed #2 ranking ( against Yahoo's #1 ), they [ overture ] are pushing to be THE largest paid listing provider, revenue that is.
I just don't get this sentence. 80% of what? Sites claiming to be search engines? Referrals? Revenue? unique visitors per month? What?

Google, by any imaginable metric, is the number one Search Engine. Adwords, and AdSense, are everywhere. IMHO, facts are facts, and Overture deal in hyperbolic spiel.

But each to his / her own.

Google have practically re-written the GNU/Linux platform to suit their needs for load balancing, clustering, shared virtual filesystems, and search, and where's the code for that...I don't think an API is "giving back to the open source community" frankly.
But it is giving back, isn't it? You can, with the API, acceess all Google's vat info. Whether it is enough is a seperate question, but to deny it is giving back is an untruth.

There is no guarantee that the work Google has done suits anyone but themselves. I sincerely hope they do open source some of their undoubtedly vast Linux based code, especially file systems accross multiple servers. But I really doubt that a lot of it is useful, extensible or even usable, by all but a tiny fraction of people. Custom solutions rarely are.

In fact, the only truly useful bit might be whatever database google uses that stores so much information for such fast retrieval. Heaven knows what that is, but it sounds extremely intriguing!

So let me turn it around, Dez, and we might be able to get an email off to Google: What exactly would you like Google to Open Source, code wise?

[Dez]

Hi ya,

>> I just don't get this sentence. 80% of what?

read the thread again, and then my post, 80% refers to 80% of the business, in the form of signed up contracted sales to search traffic, be it paid listings ( aka ads ) and sponsorships ( pcp keyworded for example ) or search traffic, such as the new deal with Sensis where Sensis has launched a global and AU search engine using the Overture owned [ who are owned by Yahoo ] Inktomi search engine..


As for the turning around the Q, I'd like to see Google get behind something like Yahoo's efforts with Nutch, give back in financial, technical, resource, and oh, code, back to open source projects that they use.

the API isn't anything to do with open source, that's a vendor lock in so that if you invest in working wiht their API, when you get big enough they just make you pay for the traffic ( Mooter for example learned this the hard way ).

Open source is about giving back value, not something like a lame API that is in the long run self serving..

But enough about Google, and Open Source.

More about Nutch!

Dez 2.0




Originally posted by projectphp
I just don't get this sentence. 80% of what? Sites claiming to be search engines? Referrals? Revenue? unique visitors per month? What?

Google, by any imaginable metric, is the number one Search Engine. Adwords, and AdSense, are everywhere. IMHO, facts are facts, and Overture deal in hyperbolic spiel.

But each to his / her own.


But it is giving back, isn't it? You can, with the API, acceess all Google's vat info. Whether it is enough is a seperate question, but to deny it is giving back is an untruth.

There is no guarantee that the work Google has done suits anyone but themselves. I sincerely hope they do open source some of their undoubtedly vast Linux based code, especially file systems accross multiple servers. But I really doubt that a lot of it is useful, extensible or even usable, by all but a tiny fraction of people. Custom solutions rarely are.

In fact, the only truly useful bit might be whatever database google uses that stores so much information for such fast retrieval. Heaven knows what that is, but it sounds extremely intriguing!

So let me turn it around, Dez, and we might be able to get an email off to Google: What exactly would you like Google to Open Source, code wise?

[projectphp]

read the thread again, and then my post, 80% refers to 80% of the business, in the form of signed up contracted sales to search traffic, be it paid listings ( aka ads ) and sponsorships ( pcp keyworded for example ) or search traffic, such as the new deal with Sensis where Sensis has launched a global and AU search engine using the Overture owned [ who are owned by Yahoo ] Inktomi search engine..
Now you've really lost me.

Sensis is powered by their own PPC ads (BidSmart or the artist formerly known as LookListings), an index they crawl themselves and Inktomi back fill. So really, that is nothing to do with Overture.

Besides, as I said, by my stats (counting over 2 million SE referrals), Google is 50% of the CPC market, and 70%+ of overall traffic to Australian based sites. I see absolutely no way that Overture is anything like 80%, or even 40%. Do you see something different? Do you have figures that indicate differently?

I'd like to see Google get behind something like Yahoo's efforts with Nutch
Really? That is fascinating news, and somewhat surprising. First I have heard of it. Can you point me to an article about that?

the API isn't anything to do with open source, that's a vendor lock in so that if you invest in working wiht their API
I didn't say the API was open source, I said it was a way to "give back". Any API, be it the MySQl C++ or PHP API or the Oracle APIs is lock in.

However, if more SEs had an API, we could write a wrapper class, and anyone could choose their own implemetation, and inegating the lock in issue. Problem is, only Google offer an API to access search results. IMHO, the issue isn't open source, it is lack of choice. Besides, locking people into a free product is weird form of lockin.

"Giving back" isn't just one thing. Tim O'Reilly, of the books fame, said the API's from Amazon and Google were great examples of giving back, and that Google and Amazon should be embraced by the community, to encourage greater participation.

Open source is about giving back value, not something like a lame API that is in the long run self serving..
So, are you saying that the API offers very little value? I am really glad it exists. There are plenty of uses for it, and it is a novel approach. IMHO, all open source is self serving, that is its strength, that there is more to gain from co-operation than from opposition. rather than pay a third party to create cludgy, unknown products, keep it all open, and let everyone have access to exactly what they get.

[Dez]

Hey ya,

great thread - finally there's more action here than there has been for .. months ?!

Originally posted by projectphp
Now you've really lost me.

Sensis is powered by their own PPC ads (BidSmart or the artist formerly known as LookListings), an index they crawl themselves and Inktomi back fill. So really, that is nothing to do with Overture.



well, actually, it's currently Inktomi search results, fed into a bunch of code you get for nix from Yahoo when you sign your life away to Yahoo to get the Inktomi search feed.

Yea, the PPC interface might be in part some code they got from the Looksmart thing, but it's predominantly Overture filled, there's no way Sensis has 99% fill for the search results Sponsors, they can only do that with Overture's injection of their massive global reach. I'm sure like all telstra ventrues they aim to do so, and they will invest god knows how much money into it, money that should really be going to tax payers rather than shareholders but that's another bug bear..

The easy way to prove that is find one of many Overture fed paid listings sites and search for the same stuff, and hey presto, well, would you look at that, it's the same listings all over the place, infact, if you were smart about how you searched, you could probably see the same results in the paid listings on FAST, Altaviata, Altavista AU, Anzwers, Yahoo AU, Yahoo, lord knows where else.. Oh, and Senis now...



Besides, as I said, by my stats (counting over 2 million SE referrals), Google is 50% of the CPC market, and 70%+ of overall traffic to Australian based sites. I see absolutely no way that Overture is anything like 80%, or even 40%. Do you see something different? Do you have figures that indicate differently?


I don't know what site or sites you're referring to so it's hard to comment on the value of the stats you're providing, perhaps it's a niche like market space that google has covered better than Overture, google sells to anyone for anything, even illegal use of trademarks now, were has Overture just won't budge, ****, I had to change listings due to their "tone", as well as "inflective" descriptions, I had to jump up and down to use the word "leading" for christ sake!

Google won't do that, and hence their taking on every crazy man and their dog's listings at whatever people are willing to pay.

****, when google started I got into the AdWords poetry game that went around the traps, and I got some darn rippers in before they made some modicum of an effort to target poems being published in text boxes for $0.01 per click!

I think my best effort was one billion views of a generic peice of prose with thousands of generic language keywords, and it cost me less than US$10 as nobody clicked on the thing.


Really? That is fascinating news, and somewhat surprising. First I have heard of it. Can you point me to an article about that?


Nutch? seriously, **** - neato - you're going to love this little puppy:

Ok, first check out the:

Nutch.ORG

web site, then wander over to:


http://www.nutch.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/PublicServers

and you'll see a bunch of folk who are playing with it.

but the mind f*ck will be at:

http://labs.yahoo.com/demo/nutch/

The feel I get and from what I can read, Overture is ( because of who's on the board of course ) backing some LAB layer work on it, and that must be resource, business, tech, bandwidth, hosting, data, etc, etc..

Note: you'll see that the Nuth "board" consists of some scary names, such as:

Board of Directors

* Mitch Kapor <--- !!!
* Tim O'Reilly <--- !!!
* Peter Savich (Overture Research) <-- !!!
* Raymie Stata (UCSC)
* Graham Spencer (Digital Consumer)
* Doug Cutting <--- * grin * he's Nutch's dad!

Well it's all good.

The bloody thing is fast, fun, and I can't wait to see it explode.

Sadly the likes of Matt at Gigablast might loose a big part of his space from it, but that's life, but I like Matt and his SE is neat, fast, and his time working on the likes of Infoseek held him in good stead for what he's doing.

I've got Nutch running on a spare 1Ghz Powerboo G4 with 512 Mb ram and an 80 Gig hard disk and I managed to easily index and search 1 million URL's in 24 hours!!

I build up a dual Opteron with 2 Tb of disk and indexed 50m in a month for fun over a lame slow DSL link, and **** myself.

I'm now playing on a 14 Tb SAN I build and have a farm of 9 servers that drive http://WebSearch.COM.AU's front end processing of inbound search requests, all crawling and indexing at around two URL's per second, so it's powering through a test build of 100 million URL's up to 5 deep into each site, seeded with a URL database I've been building since I launched WebSearch.COM.AU back on March 25th, 1994 - so it's got a good healthy seed database to grow from, and the usual suspects like the DMOZ dir et al. Stay tuned for a publicly available test site.



I didn't say the API was open source, I said it was a way to "give back".


I don't want to sound mean, but sorry, that's far from "giving back", that's a sales generation too, a loss leader, give them enough to go develop and grow an idea till they need to come back and buy more to make it worth while.

Nope, that's not giving back anything, that's using free 3rd parties as guinea pigs to find ideas that Google can just aquire ( and you know that they have done that to date ) the idea through a little cash buyout and hey presto, they launch things like bloody calculators, result clustering, spelling, oh the list goes on..


Any API, be it the MySQl C++ or PHP API or the Oracle APIs is lock in.


no, any API full stop is a lock in, will the Google API work with any other technology, say FAST, Altavista, WebSearch.COM.AU - nope.. so where's the openness there?


However, if more SEs had an API, we could write a wrapper class, and anyone could choose their own implemetation, and inegating the lock in issue. Problem is, only Google offer an API to access search results. IMHO, the issue isn't open source, it is lack of choice. Besides, locking people into a free product is weird form of lockin.


true, but have a good think about why Google does it, and why the others don't.. Yahoo doesn't need to get ideas for free, they pay people good money to think them up for them.

Almost every recent crazy inovation Google has had has come from someone saying "hey, check out this crazy use of the Google API to do XYZ" and Google saying "hey, that's neat, wish we had thought of that.. here take this cheque and bank it and come on board!"



"Giving back" isn't just one thing. Tim O'Reilly, of the books fame, said the API's from Amazon and Google were great examples of giving back, and that Google and Amazon should be embraced by the community, to encourage greater participation.


I don't think tim O'Reilly's really on track but then he's got Google and Amazon pouring billions into his coffers with Google Hacks books and the like, as if he's going to "dis' ether of those companies..


So, are you saying that the API offers very little value?


no, and you know that's not what I'm saying. What I actually said was that it's not giving back to the "open source community".

I love API's, I live buy them - you do, we all do, English is almost an API for communication between other lanugages for goodness sake.

I just don't see a propriatary API being even close to being considered "giving back to open source".

Now if say Google offered up their clustering additons to the GNU/HURD/Linux stuff, then yea, that's giving back, if they provided all the updates they have made to the Linux kernel to handle BIG MEMORY of terrabytes of distributed RAM, or their scary network additions to the kernel, their virtual distributed filesystem, which they offered a white paper on but forgot to attach the code they stole from open source in the first place with the updates!!

Now that would be giving back.

But they they are not alone, Linksys, oh it's a long list if you get into it.


I am really glad it exists. There are plenty of uses for it, and it is a novel approach. IMHO, all open source is self serving, that is its strength, that there is more to gain from co-operation than from opposition. rather than pay a third party to create cludgy, unknown products, keep it all open, and let everyone have access to exactly what they get.

I never implied there wasn't a billion things you could do with it, 4.x billion if you're to beleive the google home page ( yea right ).

But that's not the point I made.

If you use open source, which Google do, extensively 99% of what they do is build on Open source except for the search layer, then you really should be giving back in some way, funding, sponsoring, employing coders, handing code back, all that jazz.

I can't find a single thing that Google has done to get behind the open source foundations that they have built their engine on such as Linux etc, anywhere.

But enough about Google, FAST, Altavista, Inktomi, ****, they all do it, they all rave about open source, but who's really getting behind it with their hands in their pockets..

Not enough of us sadly.. but that won't kill it..

So hey, go run up Linux, Tomcat, Apache, IBM's JRE ( it's faster ), then install Nutch, and suck some URL's down, index, and have a play..

And report back in 24 hours, and let's see what you think.

Dez 2.0

ps: this post got out of hand didn't it.. sorry kids!

[ihelpyou]

Yes it did. Tone it down.

Also; Please keep politics out of here. Funny thing though, millions want to come to the US to live and millions do come every year.

And no, don't reply to this at all. You made a comment... I rebutted. Leave it at that. If you do reply back, it will be deleted.

[Dez]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
Yes it did. Tone it down.

Also; Please keep politics out of here. Funny thing though, millions want to come to the US to live and millions do come every year.

And no, don't reply to this at all. You made a comment... I rebutted. Leave it at that. If you do reply back, it will be deleted.

and you said to keep politics out of this? * girn *

surely you can't make a throw away statement like that and not expect a rebuttal? And keep that finger off the DELETE button * ducks for cover *

tsk tsk..

Dez 2.0

[Dez]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
Yes it did. Tone it down.

Also; Please keep politics out of here. Funny thing though, millions want to come to the US to live and millions do come every year.

And no, don't reply to this at all. You made a comment... I rebutted. Leave it at that. If you do reply back, it will be deleted.


don't you have a thing about free speach over there by they way?

Dez 2.0

ps: we get our share of in bound human traffic too here in Australia.