Traffic Trickery
Seems like the venture is carrying baggage for aboutus in the form of ill-will as evidenced ConcernsFAQ. When I listen to the story it sounds like this:
- AboutUs is a website that tricks Google searchers into visiting it by automatically building out pages from publicly available whois information
That's fine as a money-making proposition but it must be squared with your comments regarding making something of value, providing value to people, the community etc. So what I'm thinking about now is -- how can AboutUs generate that value (or help folks generate that value). Is "writing about websites" going to generate that value. I don't know. I mean -- if I want to write about websites I have lots of ways to do that right now. Does topsoil sound like it's going to provide the value -- or create an environment for that value to emerge -- I'm not getting that yet.
- What you are doing is currently of little value ... yet you claim it is of great value
- You're right ... and we're not going to be just about websites and we're not going to "own" the content ... information about products, people, esoterica, especially the stuff Wikipedia doesn't want to write about (Cat Steven's son could have an article on AboutUs). We'll also be hosting people's sites directly, but with our tools to allow edits.
Without belittling the achievement it's fair to say that in the grand scheme, where AboutUs sits right now is that it is an eddy in the huge Internet river. Bugs get caught in the foam generated in that eddy. Fish -- like your big sponsors come and eat those bugs. See everything can be related to Fly Fishing :) What I don't know is, how much can that eddy be grown? It does not seem to me that people are going to generate enough hand-crafted wiki content to cause significant growth of this model. And growth through SEO means seems like more of the same "trickery". Again, I have nothing against playing some tricks, but I am calling attention to the disparity between that business model and what you described in our recent call as the next big thing for AboutUs.
- We're insignificant ... we're even scavengers ... and kind of sly and shifty (trickery)
- We don't want to be. Is a few hundred a day worth our soul as a company? Does it neccesarily follow that our soul is forfeit just because we do something that is like something we know is bad?
