Secondary Sources of Targeted Traffic: All Part of the Game

Leslie Walker of the Washington Post homes in on what she terms web "clutter" -- sites and pages that may be little more than parked domain names with limited content and a lot of paid listings, not all of which are relevant to what the user is looking for. The profitability of this type of advertising is what has induced holding companies like Marchex to roll up various domain name repositories. For Marchex, this is synergistic with their existing Enhance paid search platform, a second-tier PPC which, like all second-tier PPC's, can use all the legitimate keyword inventory it can get. Such sites also sign up with publisher networks from Yahoo and Google, so Marchex earns ad revenue shares from those companies as well. Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.