He hides behind his flickering computer screen, waiting patiently until the time is right. Every waking moment, he compiles more and more valuable information about your Website -- he knows how popular it is, how much traffic it receives, what market segment it serves, and most importantly, when your domain will expire. And then he pounces. In an instant, your domain, your hard work, your time is his. Who is this elusive swashbuckling buccaneer of the Internet? He's Ultsearch... and he's coming soon to a domain name near you.
Ultsearch (who has been known to go under the alias Yun Ye) is an icon. He's a legend in his own right - yet he's also a vague apparition whom no one really knows much about. His concept is simple: pillage and plunder the 'net, one site at a time. And so far, it's working to the tune of six-figures... per day.
Has he Caught Up with You Yet?
We begin with a quick demonstration of just how ubiquitous and all-encompassing the Ultsearch concept has become.
Have you ever stumbled across a site which looked like this?
If you said yes, congratulations! You're one of the millions upon millions of passive contributors maintaining the continuity of one of the most finely orchestrated, and elusive concepts in Internet history -- an operation of truly monolithic proportions. Oh, and you've proved that Ultsearch's concept works.
If you said no, then somehow you've managed to elude the path of this king of the Internet. Don't count on it to continue for too long -- he'll catch up with you eventually.
If you're like the overwhelming majority of respondents, you answered in the affirmative -- you have visited one of Ultsearch's sites. But why are they prevalent, and what's the scoop behind his operation?
As the story goes, Ultsearch operates a PPC (pay-per-click) business based in Hong Kong, which has a portfolio of over 50,000+ registered domains that it uses for this purpose. It is believed he started grabbing domains in late 1998, and has only accelerated his acquisition strategy in recent years.
Understanding Pay Per Click Search Engines
Skip over this if you are already familiar with the concept. If not, read on...
In order to fully appreciate and comprehend Ultsearch's strategy, one must have a grasp of the concept of Pay Per Click Advertising.
In short, PPC search engines are performance-based search sites where search results are ranked according to the bid amount advertisers are willing to pay, and advertisers are charged whenever a searcher clicks on their search listing.
Advertisers supply listings, potential keywords and their bid amount per keyword. When a search is performed, the first search engine listing for a specific keyword is the one with the highest bid. The remaining listings are ranked according to bid amounts (highest to lowest). A higher ranking generally brings in more traffic. However, the higher an advertiser's search results are placed within the engine, the more he coughs up for each successful click to his site.
There are a great deal of PPC search engines on the Web. By far the largest include FindWhat, Ah-ha and 7search. Findwhat is a publicly listed company and one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet.
Large networks such as Yahoo! have, in most cases, set up a profit sharing (affiliate) agreement with large PPC search engines, to share the revenue generated by clicks originating from their sites. Google has a competing concept called Adwords, which allows advertisers to place sponsored links for specific keywords searched by Google Users.
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