"People, do good for Infospace! And after Infospace becomes richer because of that, it may donate a part of its profit to other people!"
What's wrong with the model? On the surface, it looks perfectly fine. In fact, it's a dream of life for all of us. Ask any(!) business in the world: Who will NOT be glad to donate a part of his profit, -- PROVIDED the profit appears exclusively because of a promise to make the donation?!!
So, what is bad about that?
A DECEPTIVE way of Infospace for doing such a business!
Let's start with Infospace's description of its "New Philanthropic Search Engine" DoGreatGood.com (by the way, Infospace is not the first with it; rather, it's a copycat of the famous GoodSearch.com's idea launched 4 years ago):
"The more you search, the more you help. It’s that simple."
No, it's not that simple! It depends on many factors, like a number of DoGreatGood's advertisers for your topic, and/or whether you make a real click on their ads. But anyway, the transparency problem should be the first alarming sign:
YOU NEVER KNOW HOW MUCH INFOSPACE EARNS ON YOU when you deal with DoGreatGood.com!
"DoGreatGood makes money when you search the Web on our site."
Good for DoGreatGood! But what about poor charities :)? Well, sometimes DoGreatGood is able to support them, sometimes it doesn't.
Remarkably, Infospace gets a guaranteed piece of "good" from the system, - no matter earns DoGreatGood money or not! It's in the form of raising public AWARENESS about Infospace's main businesses, e.g., Dogpile. The promotion is so deeply integrated into web design of DoGreatGood that we may call the latter a free advertising platform for InfoSpace, Inc.
So, is the DoGreatGood just a good interface to the bad Infospace?
The actual logo for DoGreatGood.com should sound like this:
"Please, help Infospace to grow its business!
We are not very popular on the search market.
In fact, we are outsiders
(less than 1 percent, according to comScore).
But by adding to description of our business such a catchy word as "charity", we gonna have a lot of you - as free "clickers" on the sponsored ads, who are a main source of Infospace's income.
We will love you,
- provided you do the job for
enriching our Infospace, Inc.
for FREE!"
We are not very popular on the search market.
In fact, we are outsiders
(less than 1 percent, according to comScore).
But by adding to description of our business such a catchy word as "charity", we gonna have a lot of you - as free "clickers" on the sponsored ads, who are a main source of Infospace's income.
We will love you,
- provided you do the job for
enriching our Infospace, Inc.
for FREE!"
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