South West eCommerce

Last week was a hard week.  We alluded to it yesterday, and as part of our grinding stubbornness to keep going, we kept pushing out the output, but didn’t get round to the month’s figures and you’re still waiting for them.

Our real issue is that we are completely at the mercy of the biggest player in the search engine game.  They also happen to be the biggest player in the internet based advertising game, and broker ads on a couple of our sites whose primary income was in advertising.  This site is one of those.

So imagine yourself in the office about 1 week ago, and we looked up from what’s a pretty solid regime of working on our affiliate stuff, plus keeping the business afloat in other areas, plus one of us on part time wages, and discover that our two biggest earning sites were nowhere to be seen in the rankings on the biggest search engine.  The key to this business seems to be information, and responding carefully to it, but the search engine in question doesn’t answer enquiries about ranking, you’re just there or you’re not.  And we’re not.

We knew that we were going to get some pretty ordinary numbers for the month but we sat down to the moment when we draw the data together, and at almost the same time in came an email from our ad broker, who spends their whole life not being evil, to say that they’ve reviewed our account and for reasons they can’t divulge, they’ve permanently cancelled our advertising account, and they don’t see why they should pay us for clicks already earned.

The infuriating and demoralising part of this is that we can’t find out what our transgression was.  On two fronts we’ve faced an assault on our ability to make a living, and there’s no requirement for procedural fairness or natural justice.  If the government took such action there would be recourse, but the big search engine has no need to explain themselves.  It can make a little guy feel very powerless.

Looking back on it, we felt more doomed than we really were.  We’re resilient guys, with clarity of purpose and knowledge to do the job right. But the weight of being hammered by a monolith with an economy much bigger than the country we live in was daunting.

Anyway, we’ve had a little good news since then, and we’ve put the blows into context.  On this site, our advertising earnings were fairly minor.  We had bigger plans but we’ll re-sell the space and this blog does other things for our business.  On the other site, we are delivering a good product and we’ll just have to rethink the business model.

The message from it now is one that many internet marketers will need to digest.  This game is going to be about still being there in the long run.  We are ready to re think the strategies we were using and we’re actually making a company policy of supporting other players, even if they are evil, because we want somewhere to fall when the big guys figure they can squash us on a whim.  We’ll still deal with the big guy, because they are the only game in town at so many levels, but we’re staying aware that to do a deal somewhere else that encourages an alternative is good business, even if we make a little less on the deal.

This leads to an opportunity.  South West eCommerce has a steady flow of clientele and they’re engaged business people.  Our feedback suggests people who are doing business in the internet and who are searching for ways to do it better.  We tweet our blog posts to more than 2400 followers.  Want a really cost effective banner ad?  We’ve got a space that should work for you.  Hit the contact us button at the top of the page and enquire about getting to a freshly vacated space on a really productive blog.