Text 10. How can companies make money from the
Internet? Many companies have tried and failed. Even big companies like AOL and
Yahoo! are doing less well these days. People did not buy enough to keep such
retailers in business, and advertising did not make enough money for them.
Martin Child, UK Managing Director of the Internet company Overture, says you
have to make it easy for is customers to find you. Advertisers pay to get their
products at the top of the list when surfers1 enter keywords on the Internet.
This is called paid-for placement searches and it seems to work. The world’s
biggest search engine is Google. It first offered paid-for placement searches
to advertisers in January 2000. Now clients can buy keywords so that customers
see their sites on the right-hand side of the screen. Google now has AOL and
Earthlink in the US and Lycos in Canada as its biggest clients. There is strong
competition, and paid-for placement companies must offer services which seem
to be different from their competitors. Staffan Engdegard, Senior Analyst at
Jupiter Research, says, ‘There isn’t much difference between them. So the
market will be very competitive.’ If advertisers see little difference in
service, the main competition will be on price. Google, says Engdegard, may
stay in first place, but it too will have to keep prices low.