The E-Z Way to Get Rich Click
Hey, GOTO.COM Investors! Want Your Company To Post a 50 Percent Revenue
Gain? Just Let Your Fingers Do the Walking.
It's often said that the Internet opens up new frontiers for the
exercise of human ingenuity. Case in point: the simple, elegantly
practicable scheme that Internet entrepreneur Derick Bulkley has
dreamed up to send the revenue of GoTo.com into orbit.
In case you haven't heard of it, GoTo.com is an Internet search engine
with a gimmick whose crass commercialism has a terrifying purity about
it. The search engine lists Web sites strictly in the order of what
they're willing to pay GoTo for click-through traffic. For example, on
a recent day, the highest-bidding (and thus top-listed) blackjack site
was willing to pay GoTo $ 7.91 everytime someone clicked through to
the gambling site from GoTo.com. The highest bidding insurance site
was paying GoTo $ 7.13 every time the search engine sent an Internet
surfer the insurer's way.
Now comes one of those twists that seems blindingly obvious once it's
pointed out. Derrick Bulkley, CEO of SeriousCollector.com, a Web Site
for, yes, serious collectors (of coins, stamps, and much more), has
figured how much revenue GoTo would rake in if, one every day, every
GoTo shareholder clicked through to the search engine's ten highest-
bidding sites.
Bulkley has no stake in GoTo, but cheerfully admits, "I do weird
analysis for fun." He has put together a spreadsheet showing that on
a recent day a GoTo shareholder clicking through once to each of the
top ten sites could generate $ 75.38 in additional revenue for the
company. If 100 shareholders took part in the scheme every day for
a full quarter, GoTo would reap $ 700,000 in additional revenue.
Participation by 1,000 GoTo shareholders for a full quarter would
produce an extra $ 6.77 million -- about 52 percent of GoTo's
estimated first-quarter revenue of $ 13.04 million.
....
So far, there's no sign that anyone has put Bulkley's scam into
operation. But just in case GoTo reports a sudden surge in revenue,
you'll know whom to thank. --- Harris Collingwood, Worth magazine |
