I love About.com.  It may be the biggest spam site on the Internet, arbitraging millions upon millions of unique visitors through a variety of CPM, CPC, and CPA monetization page views with a metric shitload of cheap content.  It’s TrustRank’d to about 11 on a scale of 10.  Basically, it’s every SEO’s wet dream.

Yet, like many other huge super-trusted old sites on the ‘Net, they are leaving a nice little uptick of traffic on the table.  The five minutes it would take them to 301 redirect all their non-www links to the canonical www version of the site would literally add millions of page views to their arbitrage factory.  Five minutes for millions of dollars of new revenue, yet they’d probably try to negotiate down the hourly rate of a good SEO to get in there and take their audience up a few notches. 

It’s not just About.com doing this.  I saw a lot of this when I was the Corporate America SEO Slut and I was left with two distinct options:

1)  Stop living the Client Lifestyle, go grow a large Internet media audience the right way, and then sell it a company like the New York Times (they paid something like $460 million for About.com)

2)  Find some friends with $10 billion to go buy up all these tired ass media companies, do some basic search engine compliance during the couple hours of day my Tivo was empty, and flip them for $20 billion after I popped their audience numbers.

It turns out I need roughly 9 more billionaire friends to do #2.  Now one of these poor old media companies will eventually buy what happened behind Door #1. 

These are truly boom times if you can deliver a large media audience.  Web 2.0 is great and all but, as far as I can tell, very few of these companies have real profitability.  Mostly they are just features that plug into bigger properties that do make money or they are just large audiences of people screwing off.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But if you can build a large media audience, you are going to make a lot of money.  Even more so if you can leverage all the stuff us SEO’s have been doing for years to cheaply acquire highly-targeted, high-converting traffic in the consideration phase of a purchase. 

There’s probably another blog post to compare a single SEO to a Spartan at Thermopylae, but l’ll save that for another day.  Hopefully, somebody at About.com will take care of this so they can be the Hero of the Month.  I’m a giver.

So, what other large Internet sites have you run across where you could increase their revenue substantially with an hour phone call?

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