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Technology Stocks : Overture (OVER) formerly (GOTO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ryan Bartholomew who wrote (43)	2/20/2002 3:23:58 AM
From: FR1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 429

Good. I'm glad I got someone to talk to that knows something. You can straighten me out on a few things. I just signed up for Overture myself and have lots of hope for the system. Generally what field do you work in? I would imagine that for $1,000/day you must be using either hi-bid phrases or very general terms which generate lots of hits. How do you track and justify your expenditure? By sending all your hits to a dedicated page? You can answer by private email if you want. I guess I will start to find out in a short while. ************************* I'll try to play devil's advocate with your comments. Here are a few thoughts that run through my mind: The Manpower Necessary for Relevancy of Words: What "Revelancy of Words" really means is that Overture gets the most profit when there are the most hits with the highest bid price. Obscure phrases that will get few or no hits at all would not be desired because they will not generate revenue. So Overture checks out your phrase and if it has had no historical hits, they steer you to phrases with historical hits and, hopefully, high bids. However, all this can be done with a simple program and it should not take much manpower. In fact no humans really need to look at the phrase you submit. The computer could simply run the phrase through the database and make sure it is getting some hits per month before Overture accepts it (you can manually do this online at Overture now). The computer can also have a robot go to the customer's url and look for the desired phrase. As I mentioned, I have just signed up a day or so ago and there may be a lot more personal support I will encounter but the basics seem to be something that can be computerized. I will say that I have sent in 2 questions so far and got immediate and polite response to each of them so I guess there is some manpower used there. The bottom line here is that there might not be that much manpower necessry. Overture's Patents: I don't know what patents they have but Amazon used to do something very close to Overture with their "sponsor" program. It seems to me that patent protection would be weak or easy to beat. Difficulty of the System: Unless I am missing something, the software does not seem all that difficult. You simply store in a relational database every word/phrase that is requested. You would only need two fields: phrase and date/time with the phrase field indexed. You can instantly query for totals on any phrase a person desires. Granted, you would also have to parse the phrase field for other keywords but there are a number of ways to handle that. Summary: Overture's Strength:** At first blush, it seems to me that Overture has two strengths: 1) The success of the whole model is based on how large a database you have to offer your customers. I may be wrong but I don't think anybody wants to finance a PCC campaign on multiple platforms. Also, if YHOO decides to leave Overture, the database for both YHOO and OVER goes way down. 2) There is a revenue split at which point YHOO can not leave. They would actually lose money if they left. Whatever that split is, Overture can probably still make money there. If they are wise, Overture will keep YHOO even at a low split because once they become firmly established Overture can up their contract. Personally, I used a system something like this on Amazon with good results. If Overture works I think it will be another ebay.

To: Ryan Bartholomew who wrote (43)	2/21/2002 8:11:12 AM
From: StormRider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 429

so was yesterday's selling overdone again?