According to Ryan Beldham, founder of MyWebRevolution.com, Google is a monopoly. In this interview, I asked Ryan why he thinks Google is a monopoly and what he thinks should be done about it. As a libertarian and fan of free markets I still think people are free to do business with Google or go elsewhere. What about you? Do you agree with Ryan? Share your thoughts in the Comments.

Anna: Why do you consider Google to be a monopoly?

Ryan: This is not an easy question to answer and is really the basis of my entire argument. But to try and sum it up, you must first know how to define a monopoly. I define it as a product or service that has exclusive control in its market space, and, must control the prices set in that market. It is important to note that this is a two-fold definition and gives a set of criteria for determining what a monopoly is.

My issue is not that Google possesses the largest market share in the search engine industry, but rather what is has done with this market share. When AdWords and AdSense were developed, Google effectively capitalized on their position and set the standard for pricing keywords; something that was never done before. Websites with larger wallets could now buy out their competition by purchasing their keywords and setting their position within Google’s page rankings.

Not only that, but Google’s product (a search engine) started as an unbiased promotional tool, categorizing websites based on a set of impartial algorithms.

With AdWords, they basically transformed into a keywords dealer, setting price standards for others to try and match. AdSense then gave Google a platform from which it could sell advertisements using its search engine algorithms as a means of distribution. And who wouldn’t want to advertise using Google since it was, and is, the most widely accessed search engine?

Google can take your product or service and push it out faster and more effectively than anyone else because it uses its massive market share to deliver these advertisements without competition.

Anna: How is this a bad thing, isn’t Google just making smart business decisions with AdWords and AdSense?

Ryan: Google has a product that contradicts itself and, as a result, negatively affects the intentions of other search engines and the efforts of individual websites. It does this by manipulating itself from a website promoter, to a keywords seller, then to an advertisement distributor. Google has taken over all aspects of online marketing — giving websites zero alternatives when trying to promote themselves via a search engine.

Anna: Don’t people have a choice when using a search engine? They can just as easily use Bing or Yahoo, right?

Ryan: The argument against Google as a monopoly has always been, ‘Users have a choice.’ And now that they are at the focus of the Federal Trade Commission for their business practices, they will have to rely on this argument even more. The truth is Google hasn’t left its users much of a choice.

For the reasons explained above, it has gained dictatorship over all things web marketing, i.e. search engines, but truth be told, yes, people do have a choice. I’m focusing on this primarily from a website’s point of view and not from a searcher’s because that is who the monopolist actions are affecting the most.

I don’t believe websites have much of a choice when they are serious about their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts because there is no other choice! Websites see their competition gaining traffic by complying with Google and its affiliates (AdWords and AdSense), and are being forced to do the same. Why go to Bing or Yahoo when Google has relatively all of the market share?

Anna: But didn’t you just say your issue wasn’t with Google’s market share; it was with AdWords and AdSense?

Ryan: Yes, but let me get something straight: AdWords and AdSense only work because of the market share that Google possesses. So, no, I have zero issues with their popularity, just what they have done with their popularity. It was once told to Spiderman, and don’t laugh, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility.’ Now apply that to Google. My belief is that Google has overstepped its right beyond that of search engines, which I believe to be an unbiased search filtering system, to that of a media tyrant. My words may seem rather strong, but it’s because of the overlooked importance of that matter at hand. Google has no right to alter the search results of its relied on algorithms based on the amount of money they receive from a certain website or organization.

Anna: So what type of regulations do you propose or what else do you think should  be done?

Ryan: My opinion is that the internet has so much potential, for good and for bad; nobody knows where it will go and how it will evolve. Right now, the internet is a virtually borderless means of gathering data and a new method of communication. Our society has yet to set any real precedents on how matters will be dealt with.

Now, with the ongoing issues of WikiLeaks and internet privacy threats, these things are starting to come to a head. I am not a lawmaker and I am not a person who forces his beliefs on others. All I can do is bring attention to the matters that I feel should be looked at.

It is everyone’s opinion that matters, and for that reason, there is no right or wrong way to manage the web ‘deities’ like Google and their actions. For now, I’ll let the people at the FTC deal with this matter and I will do what I can to continue to focus on boosting my Google page rankings (slight joke).

Related Articles:

• Google Maintains Search Engine Dominance in October 2010
• Twitter Introduces ‘Promoted Tweets’ Advertising Program (aka How Twitter – and Internet Marketers? – Will Monetize Twitter)
• Bing Takes Search Engine Share From Google
• How Will Google’s Latest Updates Affect Internet Marketers?
• What Does Google Instant Pages Mean For Internet Marketers?

Reporting its financial results for the first quarter of 2011, Demand Media, Inc. has good and bad news for shareholders. The good news is that revenues have jumped 48 percent compared with those in the first quarter of 2010. The bad news is that the company’s loss has also increased.

Demand Media’s revenues hit $79.5 million in the first quarter of 2011, 48 percent higher than the $53.6 million earned in Q110. The company’s operating loss, however, increased by 31 percent – from $3.2 million in Q110 to $4.2 million in Q111. Its net loss climbed 37 percent – from $4.1 million in the first quarter of last year to $5.6 million in Q111.

Since Demand Media’s performance exceeded analysts’ expectations, its CEO, Richard Rosenblatt was upbeat about the results.

“We reported better-than-expected results in Q1 2011, driven primarily by continued momentum from our owned and operated sites,” Rosenblatt said.

The company’s performance was largely driven by its content and media businesses, which rely on advertising revenue. Content and media revenue was $51.9 million, a huge 72 percent gain over the $30.2 million in Q110. Demand Media’s domain name business also did well, with registrar revenue
for the first quarter of 2011 reaching $27.7 million, 18 percent higher than $23.4 million last year.

Clearly, for all its revenue growth, Demand Media will need to reign in costs before shareholders can truly be happy about their investment in the company.

Related Articles:

• AT&T Dominates Display Ad Impressions in Q1 2011
• U.S. Internet Display Ads Reach 1.11 Trillion Impressions in Q1 2011
• 75 Percent of Online Retailers Using Video
• Top Level Domain Names Up 7 Percent, Surpassing 196 Million Domains in Q2 2010
• Domain Typos Costing Companies Millions

Outsourcing service, Freelancer.com, recently surpassed one million projects posted on the platform, celebrating the milestone with meetup parties in cities around the world.

The projects total over USD $86 million worth of work and – based on Freelancer.com’s fee (the higher of $3 or 3 percent of the total project cost) – suggests the company has made around $2.6 million in revenues since its inception in 2004.

Freelancer.com’s analysis of the one million projects posted on its platform reveal some interesting trends in outsourcing.

According to the company, the most popular categories for outsourcing on Freelancer.com are:

1. PHP: 8.9 percent
2. Website Design: 7.4 percent
3. Graphic Design: 4.5 percent
4. Data Entry: 3.9 percent
5. Copywriting: 3.5 percent

The top five outsourcing countries are:

1. United States: 40.4 percent
2. Great Britain: 10.4 percent
3. India: 6.7 percent
4. Canada: 5.2 percent
5. Australia: 4.6 percent

The top five freelancing countries:

1. India: 33.5 percent
2. United States: 10.9 percent
3. Pakistan: 8.7 percent
4. Bangladesh: 5.8 percent
5. Philippines: 3.8 percent

The top 10 U.S. outsourcing cities are:

1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Miami
4. Chicago
5. Houston
6. Atlanta
7. San Francisco
8. San Diego
9. Dallas
10. Austin

Related Articles:

• Flippa Releases State of Website Economy July 2011
• What’s Hot in Freelancing (and What It Means For You)
• Freelancer.com Continues Acquisition Spree, Acquires Freelancer.de
• Facebook Surpasses 515 million users, 1 in 3 Americans Has a Facebook Account
• Australians Embrace Social Networks

With revenues and profits down substantially in 2010, what will AOL do to turn itself around in 2011? According to the AOL Way, the company’s plan for ‘content, product, media engineering, and revenue management’, it will focus on boosting content production, page views, ad revenues and profits.

Business Insider recently published the leaked AOL Way and, as mentioned in Kikabink News (see Dissecting AOL’s Business Plan, ‘The AOL Way’), we’ll be going through the plan and discussing the key take-outs of interest to Internet marketers in a series of upcoming articles.

To kick off the discussion, let’s look at the objectives AOL has set for itself for the first quarter of 2011. According to the AOL Way, the company plans to do the following by the end of March:

• increase the number of content pieces produced per month from 31,500 to 40,000;
• increase content using ‘scaled production’ from 2,161 per month to 15,000;
• increase pages containing video from 4 percent of the total to 70 percent of the total. This is based on the assumption that video will boost eCPMs (i.e. effective CPMs – the cost per thousand views it can charge advertisers) to $35 or more;
• decrease the average cost per piece of content from $99 to $84;
• increase the media page views per article from 1,512 to 7,000 per article;
• increase the gross margin per article from 35 percent to 50 percent;
• widen the deployment of its ‘SEO Checker’ technology from 40 percent of stories to 95 percent;
• boost recirculated page views in the AOL network from 123 million per month to 130 million per month; and
• implement ‘Project Devil’ – a large, rich media ad unit – to boost display ad eCPMs to $25 or more.

Based on these objectives, it seems AOL’s main strategy for increasing ad revenues is to boost page views. In turn, AOL believes boosting page views is a matter of producing more content and optimizing that content for both recirculation and the search engines.

At the same time, that content must be cost-effective and profitable. So, not only does AOL want to produce more content for lower cost, but it wants each item of content to work much harder in terms of yielding page views and ad revenues.

We’ll discuss how AOL plans to create more – and more profitable – content in a later Kikabink News article. For now, let’s consider AOL’s aims to produce greater volumes of cheaper content, and to optimize that content for recirculation and search engine optimization (SEO), in order to increase page views and ad revenues.

Should you share AOL’s goals?

Well, the fact is that, unless you have the resources to build a huge audience – the ability to attract millions of unique visitors and associated page views – you’re unlikely to make much money emulating AOL’s content based advertising model.

Given that the median CPM for websites is just $5.29 (see What’s The Average CPM For an Online Publisher?) you’ll need 100,000 page views per month just to make $529 per month! Can you get 100,000 page views per month to your site? And even if you can… is there a much better way to monetize that level of traffic by, for example, SELLING information products?

Let’s face it: AOL, with 123 million page views now and its goal of 130 million per month by April 2010, is in a different league to the average small and mid-sized Internet marketer.

Having said that, if you do use an advertising model, then it’s likely that increasing traffic and page views WILL increase ad revenue. Similarly, it makes sense that optimizing your content for both recirculation – i.e. recirculating visitors across multiple web properties or, if you have one site, multiple web pages – and the search engines – will help increase traffic.

Having said that, it’s notable that AOL’s objectives do not emphasize content QUALITY as a way to increase traffic or ad revenue. While the AOL Way discusses quality standards later in the document, quality does not appear to be a major consideration for the company.

Of course, it’s not a major consideration for a LOT of Internet marketers either! Yet, to build an audience, your content must be good enough to attract people, keep them coming back, and inspire them to share it with friends.

Also, could it be that producing higher quality content is more cost-effective and profitable than producing a greater quantity of content?

Regardless of what AOL does, I suggest keeping a firm eye on how the balance between quantity and quality works in your business. There will be some ‘sweet spot’ where that balance produces the best results.

In the next article on the AOL Way, we’ll take a look at how AOL plans to produce content on a daily basis. If you’d like a more disciplined approach to producing content – or any kind of products, services, etc – in your business, you’ll find AOL’s approach illuminating.

Related Articles:

• Dissecting AOL’s Business Plan, ‘The AOL Way’
• AOL Wants More Direct Traffic, Less Search Traffic
• AOL’s SEO Plan: Optimizing Content For Readers and The Search Engines
• Forget About Anchor Text and Focus on Relevant Links Instead
• More Searches… But Fewer Paid Clicks… Why?

If you’re in the business of affiliate marketing or making money from advertising – as many Internet marketers are – you’ll want to take a look at the ‘AOL Way’. The AOL Way reveals AOL’s plans for its content publishing business, and was recently leaked to the Business Insider.

Indeed, thanks to the Business Insider, you can review the entire 58 slide presentation, ‘The AOL Way Content, Product, Media Engineering, and Revenue Management‘ at your leisure.

There’s so much gold in this document that we’ll be dissecting the AOL Way and discussing the key take-outs for Internet marketers in a series of upcoming articles in the Kikabink News Internet marketing blog.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the AOL Way is necessarily a blueprint for Internet marketing success.

The jury is well and truly out on AOL. A few weeks ago, the company reported a net loss of $782.5 million for 2010, a big come-down from its $248.8 million profit in 2009.

According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL was in ‘turnaround’ mode during 2010. It was a year in which AOL stood on its own, after parent company Time Warner spun the company off in December 2009. And it was a year of sell-offs (e.g. Bebo), acquisitions (e.g. TechCrunch) and repositioning, as AOL began remaking itself as a content publisher that makes money from advertising sales, rather than an Internet service provider that makes money from dialup Internet subscriptions.

Yet, AOL’s fourth quarter results indicate the company may have a way to go before achieving its turnaround. Even as the company moves towards being a content publisher, its Q4 ad revenues were down 29 percent compared with those in Q4 2009.

The AOL Way, it seems, is AOL’s manifesto for turning itself around. Whether or not it does the job – or whether AOL does the job – remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, the AOL Way reveals a range of objectives, methodologies and metrics that Internet marketers will find interesting and instructive. So be sure to read Kikabink News’ upcoming articles on the AOL Way, as we study the plan and extract those points likely to help us build, grow or turn around our own Internet businesses.

Related Articles:

• How Will AOL Turn Itself Around in 2011?
• MarCom Launches as The Web 2.0 Community For Marketers
• Google Incentivizing Ad Agencies To Buy More Advertising
• Who Has The Best New Media Business Model – TechCrunch or Demand Media?
• New MySpace To Launch This Fall