Webmasters Are Like Elephants...Traffic is Like Peanuts... Search Engines Are Like...
If you do a Google search for your main keyword, how
many results will Google return? I punched in the term "real estate" and Google
returned over 500 - MILLION listings. What practical benefit can come from
having such a huge list? No one would look through all those listings.
So, a person needs to "refine" their search. Perhaps they enter the state, or
the city or maybe even the neighborhood and they end up with a few hundred
thousand. Better, but still absurd.
When a webmaster (and I use the term loosely to include any one with a web
site) launches a site they will be at the end of that huge list. Experienced
webmasters know that the launch of the website is just the beginning of a long
promotion period.
I would like to make some analogies to illustrate some major points about
this process. First, I want to liken webmasters to elephants. Then, I want to
liken web traffic to peanuts. The reason I choose them two for the analogy is
their relative size. Elephants are huge, peanuts are small. Elephants eat
peanuts just like webmasters "eat" web traffic. And just like elephant's
appetite for peanuts (it takes a whole lot of peanuts to fill an elephant) it
takes a whole lot of site visitors to fill a webmaster's appetite for traffic.
Webmasters tend to travel in herds. We don't call them herds, we call them
search terms or keywords but they serve many of the same functions as herds. So
there are "herds" of real estate sites, herds of lawyer sites, etc.
Well, if webmasters are like elephants, and traffic is like peanuts then what
would a search engine be? I think a good analogy for search engines in relation
to the others would be a feed trough. A search engine is like a feed trough
where the elephants come to get their peanuts. Now some may disagree with this
analogy saying that the search engines "send" the traffic and are more like a
zoo keeper bringing the daily diet of peanuts to all the elephants. I think the
search and click patterns of the general public show the error of that idea
though. The bulk of the search engine visitors click on the first three
listings, then on the remainder of the first page, and a few more go on to the
second page but generally, that is as far as the distribution goes. If the
search engines are distributing peanuts then most of the elephants are starving.
That's why I think the feed trough analogy is more fitting. Those elephants
that are big and powerful enough fight their way to the feed trough and get all
the peanuts they want. They can even package the peanuts and resell them, if
they want, in the form of ads on their sites that bring in money, in exchange
for sending peanuts to other sites.
So what is a poor starving elephant to do? As the demand grew among the
starving elephants for peanuts certain "wise" elephants started noticing how the
peanuts were being delivered to the trough so they set up businesses called
"peanut trough optimization" (sic search engine optimization) which started
selling tips to hungry elephants about the delivery methods used for the
peanuts. With this the elephants with this secret knowledge could beat
the more powerful elephants to the feed trough. Well, all that might be true,
but there are still a whole lot of starving elephants out there.
All this brings up the issue of "access" to the "feed trough". You see, even
if you have tons of peanuts, but you only have a few feed troughs, there won't
be enough room for the elephants to get to the feed trough. Those on the outside
of the rush starve, and those on the inside are pre-occupied with maintaining
their position. If this is an erroneous analogy and the feed trough is, in fact,
large enough (after all, it IS the Internet) to deliver peanuts the evidence
would show that a new elephant could walk up to it and get all the peanuts it
wants. That is not the situation, however, as previously discussed. New
elephants have to push their way to the trough.
Some have tried training the elephants. One method thought of was to paint
white lines radiating from the feed trough and then training the elephants to
all stand in or on these lines to get to the feed trough. These white lines are
an analogy for keywords. If one line, like the term "real estate", for example
has 500 million elephants in line then the "trainers" teach an elephant needs to
find another line to stand in. There are even Internet tools that can count how
many "elephants" are using a particular line (keyword).
As the elephants circle the feed trough looking for a small line they soon
realize all the lines are full and as they get closer to the trough they all
disappear under the mass of elephants trying to feed anyway. So the trough
owners developed a way to have the elephants pay to be moved up to the trough
ahead of everyone else. They charge them "per peanut". this helped get the big,
powerful elephants aside so other elephants could eat and since there always was
an abundance of peanuts anyway they can maintain both systems at the same time.
They can both charge elephants to be brought to the feed trough and also let
others push and shove for the free peanuts. And since there are plenty of
starving elephants there is plenty of demand for more paid peanuts. All the feed
trough owner needs to do is figure a faster, more efficient way to bring the
paying elephants back and forth from the feed trough. And, oh yeah, they can
always raise the price for the peanuts along the way. It should be obvious to
anyone with the least amount of experience promoting websites that this is an
analogy of the Pay Per Click system.
As the current systems train the elephants to keep their mind on the white
lines (keywords) none of them realize the problem is the centralized feed
trough. Elephants want to go to where the peanuts are. If someone were to
mention to the elephants that there just may be other ways to distribute peanuts
they'd be trumpeted out of the herd.
But what if there were hundreds or thousands of feed troughs with the same
number of peanuts distributed between them then all the elephants could get
access to peanuts, couldn't they?
That in a nutshell :-) is what the Bungee Bones site is about. The Internet
was built on the idea of the hyperlink. Collecting millions of hyperlinks in one
location just doesn't make sense from a logistical consideration. Bungee Bones
is about establishing millions of "feed troughs" owned and operated by
webmasters themselves. Bungee Bones is about enabling an easy to use system for
webmasters to create "micro" Googles (or macro hyperlink directories) and
for them to get reasonable pay from it.
