Rick Latona – This early Klixxx contributor and traffic expert shared this with us back in the day! Still relevant? You decide…
”I’m amazed how often we were right back in the early days of the World Wide Web. Just the other day I was pondering how during 1996 and 1997 you could walk down Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, mention the word search engine, and get a check from an investor. After all, we knew that with the billions of Web pages to come, we’d have to have a search engine to find anything. We were absolutely confident back then that most users would start at a search engine and surf from there. Thus - the birth of the portal.
Well, a couple of years later the advertising market fell through the floor and companies like Yahoo, Alta Vista and Lycos went crazy. They focused all their attention on crazy products and outsourced their actual search technology to Google!
Here we are in 2004, and all Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL spend their time thinking about is how to catch up to Google. Google kept it pure, and concentrated on what was right. Right, was having the best search engine technology. The savvy Internet user would certainly figure out which one was best, and set Google.com as their home page. This is exactly what has happened.
What does this have to do with the adult Internet space? Well, our top converting site in CJ Bucks is our all-access site www.adultvideoonline.com. Also, through Consumption Junction, nothing converts better than the Nasty Dollars all-access site and the other all-access sites we are sending traffic to. Does that mean that we were right in 1996 and 1997 with the super site? Did we spend the last six years thinking that we had to go niche only to find out we were just doing the super site wrong?
What about TGPs? In 1996 and 1997, you just wanted your site to be sticky and to attract return visitors. You didn't care if it was a free site. You knew that you would be building an asset that would make money for decades to come. Then we spent six years claiming that TGP traffic is the worst you can get. Flash forward to today and we all wish we owned the biggest TGP.
Am I on to something here? What else was right in '96 and '97?"
Again, Rick wrote this in 2004, the year Google went public. AOL is trying to decide what it should be now and Microsoft and Yahoo! are still trying to catch Google. TGP traffic is still reputed to be the worst, but everyone wants it. The all-access-pass has taken the place of the super site and the more things change, the more they remain the same ;-) Rick needs to give us some more predictions!
Flashback - First Adult B2B Blog
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Flashback! Rick Latona 2004
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