In the ever-changing world of the adult Internet, one thing remains consistent: the need for traffic. It's what every affiliate program needs, what every webmaster wants, and what every other person is vying for. One unique way webmasters have discovered to monetize traffic is by including vertical search engines or site searches (aka "vortals") on their sites, thereby enhancing their content pages and courting additional revenue with minimal effort.
One company leading the way with this technology is Search Vortal LLC. Located in the Woodland Hills area of the San Fernando Valley just outside Los Angeles, Search Vortal is positioned to steer the adult industry into a completely new realm of search functionality and easy revenue. “The goal is to take the regular search traffic and target it toward more specific advertisers,” says Daniel Kay, Search Vortal’s vice president of business development.
Search Vortal is actually a subsidiary of Mainstream Advertising, which was itself the result of serendipitous meetings between 10 venture capitalists, linked to the company Crossbow Ventures, at conferences and Internext trade shows. The team started out purchasing domain names and building brands in the early ’90s, acquiring strong assets and intellectual property that they were able to monetize and leverage in dealing with some of the larger search engines.
After dabbling in cost-per-acquisition networks, Kay says the team had an epiphany. “The flaw in that model was the conversion ratio and the chargeback ratio. If it went over a certain percent, you’d lose your merchant account, and you had to pay per trial. We were really focused on domain monetization, and we tried to figure out [how to] monetize that traffic. In doing that, we came up with the search vortal, because it’s probably the best product we’ve developed that enables us to keep retention on a particular domain-landing page.”
The program allows webmasters to earn advertising revenue from each and every page of their sites just by adding a Search Vortal search box. Search Vortal provides relevant text and image ads that precisely target a particular site and its content. Search Vortal then delivers applicable text ads that are aimed at the search box’s results. The ads can be displayed on a site, which maximizes potential revenue earnings. Most uniquely, in addition to customized vortals that can be specifically targeted based on keywords or type of content, a Search Vortal search box ensures visitors will remain on a particular site longer, since they can keep searching for other products from the vortal.
“The goal was to get to the deeper search functionality of the Web,” Kay states. “For example, we have portals like Yahoo! and Google and all these other guys, where people start out searching, but they might end up at a verticalized page that they want. And, at that point, they might want to conduct a second search or look for more products. So, instead of sending them back to the primary portal [like Google], we try to take that user and give them what they want by building the verticalized search on targeted properties and then getting them to the actual advertiser’s site.”
As with most new products that try to revolutionize the industry, the Search Vortal product was slow to take off. “I think the biggest hurdle was just introducing it to the market,” Kay remembers. “Many people were used to Yahoo!’s Publisher network and Google’s AdWords network, and this was a new product that directly competes with both of those. So, the biggest problem was competing with the higher [cost per click], just because of the fact that on Yahoo! and Google you get those $1 or $2 per-clicks, and from our end, we needed to really step up and increase our payout to affiliates.”
That was done via the product’s affiliate program, CashNews.com, by “building our internal network and these partnerships with affiliates to where we have generated CPC from our upstream providers,” Kay asserts. “Webmasters might want to integrate a search vortal onto their site, but they really need a dollar per click in order to see some real return. We built it out in a way to where we can really compete with those larger networks.”
The company also got a much-needed publicity boost last year when they began allowing MySpace.com users to include search vortals on their profile pages, thus giving non-webmasters a chance to make some extra revenue as well. “That generated a lot of traffic for us and got us a lot of publicity from Yahoo! and Google and MSN,” Kay recalls. “From that point, we knew it was definitely a great product and was generating a lot of buzz in the industry. End-users were using it day in and day out, and that was the main key—seeing the conversions and seeing our advertisers happy with sales not just paying for clicks, but actually getting conversions from the traffic.”
Interestingly, MySpace refused to confirm that any such deal with Search Vortal existed, although the vortals continued to show up on member profile pages, and the word-of-mouth contributed to Search Vortal’s rise in both the mainstream and adult worlds.
As Kay sees it, the product is a “value-add” for adult webmasters. “If you integrate a search-feature functionality into your core site, you’re going to generate more revenue overall,” he says, “as opposed to just sending [traffic] to [an affiliate program] and getting your $35 payout. We’re giving the affiliate something they didn’t have before, which is essentially a great form of traffic monetization.”
Having made strides in the adult industry with both the Search Vortal product and its age verification system, NetBouncer (which gives people “passes” into its network “to view free content” and “gives webmasters the ability to just download content with a search box and build a customized community around our technology”), the company could become an industry staple. According to Kay, the Search Vortal team is more than ready to stick it out for the long haul. “We’ve learned that people start leaving the industry over time. Webmasters, in particular, who are working out of their homes but who aren’t able to cover their overhead close up shop after a while. We’ve tested it, and we’ve seen that with this product, you’re able to generate the recurring revenue you need to keep afloat. If for some reason you don’t convert traffic, that’s fine, because it’s not really about conversions. We pay on the click, so overall, you’re going to generate more revenue than you would with any other CPA-type network out there.”
Citing the company’s shift from CPA networks to the Search Vortal product as an example, Kay adds, “There are always hardships, and we’ve gone through hardships trying to stay afloat. We’ve seen things come and go. Re-shifting our focus to more of a search-plus-adult focus has taken us to the next level, because it’s helped us generate recurring revenue without having to worry about getting paid.”
There are big things ahead for the company, including a domain monetization product called DittoDomains.com that aims to take on industry giants like DomainSponsor.com and Fabulous.com with a one-click implementation—and that is backed by one of the major search engines. Furthermore, with more than 4 million (and growing) domain names in its portfolio, Search Vortal is getting bigger by the minute. “We’re constantly modifying and optimizing the Web result portion of the product to get the highest quality results, as well as streamlining the sponsored results to make sure they’re relevant,” which is pretty much the goal of the company, Kay adds. “It’s all about being—and staying—relevant.”
