The Search Big Daddy Business Model

Search engines come, and search engines go. That's the nature of the beasts. Some get swallowed up by their competitors; others simply disappear from the Internet. Once in a great while, however, a new search engine comes along and beats all the odds by becoming successful.

One of those that seems to be beating the odds is the relatively new search engine, Search Big Daddy. On the day this article was written, they had an Alexa ranking of 1,380. That means that on that day they had the 1,380th most visited Website, out of the millions of Websites on the Internet, by surfers that had the Alexa toolbar installed on their computer.

The lower a Website's Alexa ranking is, the more visitors they are receiving. For example, among the top search engines Yahoo has an Alexa ranking of 1, MSN has an Alexa ranking of 2, and the Alexa ranking for Google is 3.

The popularity that Search Big Daddy is enjoying at this point in time is due in some part to the business model they are using for their search engine. It is quite unusual when compared to the business models of the three major search engines mentioned above.

Just like those search engines, Search Big Daddy offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but with a twist. The twist is that Search Big Daddy provides their own advertisers with the "dollars" they use to purchase PPC advertising from them.

Here's how their business model works:

In order to bid on a keyword placement at Search Big Daddy, visitors must first sign up as a member. When they sign up, they are provided with their own search engine portal and $50 (as of the date of this article) in advertising dollars. They can use any portion of that $50 to bid on keyword placements, just like they would at any of the major search portals.

New members also receive an opportunity to create one top keyword position for the keyword or keyword phrase of their choice, providing that keyword or keyword phrase has not already been taken by another member.

Once they select a top keyword position, the Webpage they have chosen to link to from that keyword or keyword phrase shows up at the top of the search results when someone searches on that keyword or keyword phrase.

That Webpage is shown in a small IFrame (inline frame) with a scrollbar on the right. Below the IFrame, searchers will find the regular search results, both paid listings and free listings, for that keyword or keyword phrase.

Members can earn more advertising dollars by referring other people to Search Big Daddy. Each time a new person they referred signs up, they earn advertising dollars.

Members also earn advertising dollars each time they perform a search on their personal search engine portal or when someone they referred performs a search on their own personal search engine portal.

Once they have accumulated a certain amount of advertising dollars through all those methods, a member can use those dollars to purchase additional top keyword positions or to bid on regular PPC keyword placements.

You may be wondering how a search engine could survive on the Internet using a business model that provides their advertisers with the money to use for purchasing PPC advertising from them. That's where the rest of their business model comes into play.

Search Big Daddy earns income in several different ways. They offer a paid upgrade to free members that wish to become a "Keyword Sponsor". They sell "Keyword Manager" positions. They also sell keyword links on "Niche Keyword Cloud Pages".

Soon (possibly by the time you are reading this article) all members will have, in addition to their own search engine portal, their own Blog pages at Search Big Daddy. I'm sure they have plans to monetize those Blog pages in some way as well.

If I had to guess, I would say that 95% or more of the traffic that Search Big Daddy is getting on a daily basis is from Internet marketers that are trying to stake their claims for top keyword positions.

It remains to be seen whether or not ordinary Web surfers will eventually start using Search Big Daddy as their search engine of choice. Judging by the large amount of traffic this search engine is currently receiving, there are a lot of Internet marketers out there that are betting that those ordinary surfers will, over time, migrate to Search Big Daddy.

Bob Hampton is the Webmaster for http://www.bobsmarketingtools.com, where he offers various tools for Internet marketers. Visit http://www.bobsmarketingtools.com/searchbigdaddy/index.php to learn more about their business model.