If you try to visit www.searchme.com today, don’t bother: you’ll be redirected to Google instead. Apparently, the positive media coverage (including one of my articles on SitePoint) did not help the Sequoia Capital funded startup to get a new round of financing.

CEO Randy Adams wrote a letter to Michael Arrington, where he explains the reasons for taking the site down:

We knew when we started the company that to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo,it was going to take at least $100 million, half to build the back end across thousands of servers and half to get distribution (maybe more with Microsoft spending $100 million on Bing advertising alone). What we didn’t plan on was the terrible downturn in the economy which made it impossible to raise another $50 million to get distribution (mainly through toolbar deals).

CEO Adams is obviously very naïve if he thinks that $100 million is enough to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google. I was pretty enthusiastic about searchme.com myself, but attempting to compete with the search giants with a “visual search engine” is unrealistic: while pretty to look at, a visual search engine, as refined as it may be, will probably never become too popular online, because the users need information more than they need pretty pictures.

Searchme.com raised around $44 million in venture capital, a stunning number for a startup that allegedly copied http://search.spacetime.com/ . If Searchme.com ever manages to get another round of funding, I hope they will rethink their strategy and, instead of trying to compete with Google, they will actually try to attract a more plausible audience: the iPhone users.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Another Search Engine Bites the Dust

The weekly startup review initiated with PageTiki continues today with PerformancingAds. This, in my opinion, is an obscure advertising system that supposedly helps “great publishers get partnered up with great advertisers.”

For research purposes I will include in this article some affiliate links to PerformancingAds (to see how many clicks will appear in my affiliates control panel). Please note that this is a negative review of the service and I do not recommend PerformancingAds as a feasible monetizing option for your site/blog.

PerformancingAds released its service on July 24 with a biased list-type of announcement on their corporate blog. Behind the service there are names like Ryan Caldwell, Chris Garrett, Sean Hickey and Randa Clay – all web authorities, respected professionals in the blogosphere. These are the names that “baited” so many people into becoming PerformancingAds users.

I haven’t tested the service as an advertiser, but I can today express my opinion as a publisher and an affiliate.

Something Fishy in PerformancingAds Land…

Creating an account with PerformancingAds is easy. You submit some basic information, go through a basic confirmation process and you are in.

Then you submit your sites, set up your advertising fees, get a script code and paste it wherever you want to display PerformancingAds on your site. This sounds simple and clean, doesn’t it?

Next, you wait for advertisers to “book” advertising space on your sites. In the meanwhile Performancing will display its own banners, at its discretion or place miscellaneous banners on your sites – apparently based on a “traffic exchange” basis:

A publisher earns a set baseline of credits simply for displaying ads, and earns even more credits when ads are sold on his or her site. Credits are then converted into free traffic for the publisher.

I was not inspired to make screenshots of my sites in the first two days of displaying PerformancingAds because honestly… I haven’t expected the service to be so full of bugs. So “fishy.”

Let me explain.

PerformancingAds showed for two-three days ads from its network on my site. There where links to http://performancingads.com/ and a few other sites from the SplashPress Media network. I treated these as “exchange” ads and I ignored them.

If you have not sold all of your advertising spots, Performancing Ads will show exchange ads in their place. Exchange ads are ads from other sites in the network and count towards your exchange credits. Exchange ads always defer to paid-ads, so as soon as someone buys an ad on your site, the paid ad will replace an exchange ad.

At the beginning of September I noticed that the ads displayed by the PerformancingAds script on my sites changed. I logged into my account and I was happy to see 6 bookings in my reports for September. There were 2 bookings for each site I submitted. Today these bookings magically disappeared – although the ads still show on my sites.

PerformancingAds still displaying ads on Rounite as I write this article.

Naturally this raises questions about Performancing’s integrity. Do they charge the advertisers and do not pay the publishers? Frankly, this is exactly how it looks.

Advertisers book banner ads on a publisher’s site on weekly basis –at least according to Performancing.

Why do you use weeks instead of months?

We get asked this question a lot. The simple truth is that at the end of the day, it increases the level of entry for advertisers. By having more advertisers involved in our network, our publishers will make more money, more consistently. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So if advertisers book banner space for one week, how come that the bookings completely disappear after 2 days (!) from a publisher’s account and how come that these advertisers remain featured on the publishers’ sites? Do the ads convert to “exchange ads” over night? If so, why is http://umarsiddiqi.com/blog/ not displaying any Rounite ads?

The questions “how does the exchange system work?” receives from Performancing a nebulous answer:

Good question! The exchange system is a credit based system that is internal to Performancing Ads publishers. A publisher earns a set baseline of credits simply for displaying ads, and earns even more credits when ads are sold on his or her site. Credits are then converted into free traffic for the publisher.

The “exchange” is obviously random and incontrollable. In the PerformancingAds control panel there are no stats to show you where your “exchange ads” are being shown or how many referrals you get from the so called “traffic exchange.”

In this equation only PerformancingAds wins.

The affiliates program is even more nebulous. If you are logged into your account there is no way to access the information from this page: http://performancingads.com/affiliates

This is how the page reads when you are logged off:

And this is what the same url displays when you are logged in.

The question “how much I make per referral” was not included in the “help” FAQ for affiliates. There is also no way to tell whether the affiliate signed under your referral id is a publisher or an advertiser.

With mysterious disappearance of bookings from my account, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of affiliates reset to zero tomorrow. More mysterious is the number of clicks reported in my affiliate account.

I had days when TerraHermes had 8000 unique visitors. Please note that the PerformancingAds affiliate banner is on the header of the blog. Do you think that out of 8000 visitors no one clicked on that banner? Not even by accident? According to my tongue-in-cheek calculations, at least five users drank too much Finlandia and passed over the keyboard accidentally hitting the banner; two husbands (or wives) got slapped at the back of the head for being on the Web too long and clicked the banner; at least four users had mistakenly travelled to one of my sites trying to find performance cars (and clicked on the “performancing” ad) and finally… statistically… at least 8 users (or 0,01 percent of 8000) actually clicked on the banner as intended.

PerformancingAds is a mystery and I am not the only one to complain. See Ben Barden’s four week review – it’s more in-depth than mine. Not many web authorities are criticizing the system, and we do have some users experiencing “problems” with their PerformancingAds… I guess the others are too busy to notice or too busy advertising the system…

So far I am deeply disappointed with Performancing and I wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends. I continue to run the script for a while, just for the sake of the argument. I am also very curious how many “clicks” will appear in my “affiliates” reports after this article and basically till the end of September 2008 – when I will publish my conclusions. I will discontinue using PerformancingAds at the end of the month and I will donate all winnings (if any) to a cause you recommend.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Performancing Lacks Performance

Google “has been” perhaps the very best at giving people what they want – a little cash for the time and content they offer online. Following suit, Revver the video entity and others have offered monetization models for people who contribute.

We had the opportunity today to review Zadby perhaps even more viable site for actually paying people for the time and expertise.

This startup essentially refines the producer/advertising interconnection by allowing both to freely contribute and evaluate potentially worthwhile promotional videos. In essence Zadby is what we might call a DIY video advertising market. Imagine the possibilities for both to seek out emerging talent and ad niches where none might exist otherwise.

Besides having a great angle on “cutting out the middle man” as far as video is concerned, Zadby has a very nice platform and a simple interface.

The actual user interface is kind of Web 1.0 really, but it does not need to be high tech to accomplish the mission of letting people find either projects or people to fill them. When you get right down to it, anyone wanting to either make or utilize productions. On the face of it, and in reality, all any user has to do is; sign up, search for a commission (or list one), shoot their video, submit it and get paid if they complete the contract.

I think of the system as a kind of Elance for video. A great idea.

From the Horse’s Mouth

The screens below are from the company’s corporate pitch, and like the simplicity of the site they convey some realities of doing business via video.

• Firstly, Zadby provides a conduit for advertising and marketeers to reach hard to reach segments and venues.
• Secondly, the service obviously operates the same way with regard to opening up a new market for “would be” video producers.

By tapping in to the massive user generated supply line for video and talent, Zadby just may have created a singular niche for themselves in that no one else has tried effectively to become a middle ground in such a way. As illustrated in the screen below, Zadby makes it easier to reach the difficult to reach or influence.

The Shortest Distance

Everyone who took a geometry course knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. As the illustration below points out however, the points in between play a big part in this geometry. Traditionally advertisers have sought agencies connected to media and ultimately the public. This seems like a rather direct approach until one considers the limitations and cost. Zadby short circuits the process, and conceivably the costs, by hooking advertisers directly into the talent and production stream. In principal this is a stupendous idea. There are problems however, as we will discuss later.

Pros And Cons

The great news for Zadby is that no one is competing in this way in this niche effectively. Also, the Web 2.0 principal of optimizing user generated value are inherent in the developer’s vision obviously.

People simply love the idea of having an avenue for their ideas, art, dreams and ultimately monetary reward. In essence, anyone with a hint of talent in making video might now gain access to customers they might never have reached before – ever. Brands will also have a virtually limitless library or resource for value content, and perhaps even more likelihood of find that “special” talent or pop icon. In essence, both ends of the spectrum are looking at a potential win-win.

Now for the bad news. Zadby has several issues or hurdles to overcome. First, finding a potential video ad gig, making a video, submitting it to Zadby and waiting to see what happens is not exactly what we might call a user friendly approach.

We joined up easily and found the aforementioned simplicity, but since we are not video producers (and because of time) we have no clue what the end process is actually like. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but suffice it to say Zadby needs a much more integrated approach to this aspect of the process.

A suggestion might be featuring videos with ads with “no home” so to speak. In this way producers and ad seekers alike might see some graphical “grass” in this field of dreams. When all is said and done, Zadby is really not eliminating the “middle man” as it were. Instead, they are in a way replacing the ad company with their more DIY version. To get past this the developers need to come up with a more visible platform for their “mini video mart”.

Refining A Great Idea

The most powerful ideas need a platform, visibility, traction and obviously the technology to back it up. In the end, every successful startup I ever tested became more of a story of the people behind it than the technology. However, there can be no shortcut employed when providing users with the tools they need. Zadby has a way to go in this regard if their vision is as big as the market they seek. Refined, bug free interfaces and ultimately a bunch of people seeking video ad fodder are what the service needs. After some thought, anyone can begin to list the hurdles before the development.

Given that the people behind this little ad machine are smart, they also need to understand that market entry, visibility, site specifics and other issues are a ticking time bomb. One huge stumbling block (or monster waiting in the wings) is someone like my friend Dmitry Shapiro at Veoh taking up the gauntlet and using their immense network and refined video capability to do just the Zadby thing – tomorrow. I am a fan of smart people, and I certainly hope these guys get some help putting this thing on wheels. A great idea, perhaps moving a little too slowly.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Something For Your Time – Monetizing Video

First things first: today I started a new category on eWritings, called “startup review.” The purpose? To fight Web boredom. Seriously. I am thinking that by monitoring some of these startups I’ll get a better insight of the trends and ideas that ultimately lead to the birth of a great Web service. I am also hoping that my professional skills will serve the reviewed entities in finding a direction for their endeavor.

I noticed that many of these startups are clueless as to what it takes to make a mark on the modern Web spectrum. I’m guessing that their creators are mostly kids in a garage. They probably have no funding but they have ideas that, with the right guidance, could grow. Ultimately, I hope that my reviews will help these startups get noticed by the users, potential investors and journalists who could promote them better. Without any further delay, let me introduce PageTiki.

What Is PageTiki? – Pick Your Definition

Without even plunging into a deep description of the service, I give you the opportunity to pick your definition of PageTiki, just for fun.

Is it:

• A purposeless service designed to waste your time and patience?
• A good idea gone wrong?
• A good idea with a meaning we’ll miss because we simply cannot understand the obvious?
• A combination of all of the above?

How can you possibly choose if you don’t know the service? To be honest, you can’t, but I thought I might as well spare you the trouble of actually visiting the site, creating an account and spending 30 minutes in wonder and astonishment, repeating to yourself, over and over again, WTF as I did.

If PageTiki’s statements are true, then the service can track “visual content” on a web page and their algorithms are smart enough to ignore insignificant changes like timestamps, counters, etc. This leaves room for important visual changes only.

Question: why would you want to monitor the changes in the design of a page? I can see how this could be interesting for web designers and web trends analysts; I can see how the editors of Web Pages that Suck could use the service; and I can even see a Jakob Nielsen monitoring a few hundreds of sites at once to gather material for his usability reports, but I seriously cannot see the average user spending time at PageTiki.

For people in my line of work, monitoring web trends is one of those vital elements that make our business sell. Trends show you how the markets evolve, and they also show what the users expect and react to. Changes in competitor sites are usually not random acts, but the result of user feedback, surveying, and expert analysis. I can see how a site that monitors these types of changes in real time can be useful for web development and marketing analysis. But this is a niche market, with a limited number of users and these users are typically the ones who could actually pay for such a service.

But It’s Not Designed for Professionals

So how does PageTiki, which is also a free service, expect to grow and to monetize? I am guessing that the service will eventually cease to be free or become “paid” for those who want to monitor many pages.

There is a funny “tiki bucks” system I couldn’t yet figure out. Apparently when you “run out” of tiki bucks you can email the tiki to get more… A thread on the Tiki Google Group sheds some light on the “how to monetize” matter:

Starting today, you must have a balance greater than 10 TikiBucks in order for your pages to be checked.

PageTiki is running on a small server and can only accommodate users who monitor 10 pages or less. This isn’t a hard limit, but the flow of TikiBucks to your account will be gradually metered to a quantity that only affords that number of sites. Of course, this really depends on how often you configure page checks, since each check “costs” 33 TikiBucks. Do the math.

Eventually, the ability to buy more bucks may be added. This will help pay for the cost of a larger server. Until then, enjoy your fair share!

In other words: when and if PageTiki becomes popular… “buh-bye free rides.” And as far as “small servers” are concerned, we can only assume that PageTiki resides on a laptop in someone’s garage in Palo Alto.

The service looks amateurish so far, the company blog is hosted by WordPress – which makes me wonder about their server and database capabilities again. The entries on the blog point to at best immature thinking in corporate strategy – the developers are either very young or not interested in “quatsching” too much about their creation. The threads on the blog are some of the shortest I’ve ever read. Suggest: move the blog to twitter.

It’s pretty unclear who is behind the service, and if you were wondering about the FAQ the questions and answers remind me of MyBlogLog’s FAQ section back when the service was launched. These Q/A were made for fun and not for potential users.

Another aspect that strikes me is the language used on the site. The style makes me believe that the site is addressed to an audience under 14, especially the “be good and have fun” part you can find on the TOS page. This sounds like the 1950’s TV show “Howdy Doody”

A Good Idea, But the Developers Are Missing the Point

The idea is good. I cannot be the judge of the algorithms and the back end, since I have no access to these. But as I said above, a service that monitors in real time web site changes (design) could become a useful tool for professionals in many web development fields. Online marketing and advertising, as well as online PR could also use the service. As for ordinary users… I simply cannot see the point.

Advice to the developers:

• Make PageTiki private beta, refine the back end and UI, work on the algorithms and add some professional monitoring and reporting features.
• Then ask a beta reviewer to test your service and publish a review on one major Web 2.0 outlet.
• When you think you are ready for the spot lights, create a “free” type of account for “testing the service” and monetize based on how many sites users want to monitor each month.
• Be prepared for high traffic, especially if you manage to create a service that is powerful enough to satisfy Omniture – look at their OTTO digital content design consulting to see a possible application for what you created.
• Make a better About PageTiki page and explain who needs such a service and application areas. I think I already gave you a few ideas.

This ends this week’s startup review and also the free advice I am willing to offer.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

The Weekly Startup Review: PageTiki