IP: The price of eyeballs

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 11:42:33 +0200
From: Bruce Krulwich <krulwich@geocities.com>

The only thing more frustrating than predictions that don't come true is
predictions that come true before you can tell anyone!

I wrote an article two months ago that predicted that portal/search
companies would start affiliate programs, similar to those of on-line
stores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  While store affiliate
programs pay a percentage of purchase revenue, portal affiliate programs
would basically pay for user eyeballs.  The article continued to make a
second prediction, that portal sites would start to buy community sites,
specifically that Yahoo would buy Geocities.  The article was titled
"The future of portals and the price of eyeballs."

While I was pitching the article to magazines, both of these two
predictions came true.  Yahoo's purchase of Geocities is already big
news, and the first portal affiliate program has just been launched by
goto.com.

See my original article, with last-modified date of Jan 5, in:

  http://www.geocities.com:80/ResearchTriangle/9430/eyeballs.html

Bruce


-- 

Dr. Bruce Krulwich                                 AgentSoft
Director of Engineering                            38 Pierre Koenig St
Senior Research Scientist                          Jerusalem, Israel
krulwich@geocities.com                             +972-2-648-0573 x311
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/9430/    Fax: +972-2-648-0670