Do Mainstream Media Sites Get Their “Fair” Share of Search Traffic?
My colleagues have been diligently reporting from SXSW this week on various topics, including mainstream media’s ongoing efforts to adapt to the new environment of the Web, including competing with content farms for prime positioning in search engines. In my last post, I noted that mainstream media (MSM) brands likely generate over 50 times the revenues of non-branded web properties. But the reporting from SXSW made me wonder about one important question – do mainstream media brands get their “fair” share of search traffic? Rather than build suspense, allow me to jump to the punchline. My research indicates that, despite their significant advantages, MSM brand sites are not effectively targeting search traffic and, as a result, content mills and other unbranded sites are winning a disproportionately large share of this market.
Content farms are Web properties that aggressively target search queries with very specific content that attempts to directly address the searcher’s intent in performing the query. Because they aggressively target specific queries, content farms have a distinct advantage over MSM in generating traffic from these queries. They have processes that ensure that their articles are loaded with search terms that match as closely as possible the searcher’s query. For instance, Answers.com (the fourth largest research site on the Web) has an article in their Wiki titled “What is the largest animal in the world?”. When a searcher is seeking to answer that question by performing a search at Google, Answers.com has a distinct advantage.
17 March 2010 By Admin
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