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Let's see... Under their proposed profit share, if they achieved DDG levels of traffic (100M queries/day, assuming $0.01 per query in net ads profit, that is $9

Let's see... Under their proposed profit share, if they achieved DDG levels of traffic (100M queries/day, assuming $0.01 per query in net ads profit, that is $900k/day distributed among conservatively speaking 10M creators/sites) distribution would be $0.09 /day to an average content creator owning an average site. It does not sound much. If it was to magically fully replace Google tomorrow (10B queries/day) it would generate $300/month for 10M creators. Assuming content creator needs $5k/month to make a living, Yep would need to achieve ~160B queries/day which is ~16x scale of Google (problem: not enough humans). The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something?

viraptor 4y ago
Pages are not created equal and averaging numbers here seems to be of little use. In practice the popularity is likely closer to some exponential-like distribution. Similar to music streaming services. Lots of people wouldn't get anything but they probably don't expect anything either.
- freediver 4y ago
  I was using averages because this model is supposed to help the "average creator", those left behind in the current Google-economy model. "Whales" and "superwhales" (which is what as you correctly conclude this model would probably converge to too) already exist in Google-economy world so not really interesting to observe. They would just make the average creator make even less. This person for example (from their article) "Say, you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Imagine getting paid to share creative recipes, take photos and instruct website visitors on how they too can make amazing pancakes." Would make $3/month (+- order of magnitude) if Yep was ever to achieve DDG level of success.
  - fastball 4y ago
    You put "average creator" in quotes but from my reading of their site Yep has not claimed they will help the "average creator", just "creators". If Yep shares a higher percentage of revenue with creators than Google, surely that is helping creators even if it doesn't mean you're achieving some sort of imaginary "no man left behind" standard for the average creator.
- popcorncowboy 4y ago
  If so, this quickly leads to the end-game of a dedicated industry that juices the ~~Ahrefs~~ Yep algo with bot armies and shady SEO tactics to push sites up the curve to capture this non-linear payout.
botsbreeder 4y ago
Not all content is equal. Good content require efforts, often efforts of a team. Youtube is a good example of how revenue share will work in practice. Some creators are getting millions there, some maybe hundreds. But as a consumer you can find good content for almost any topic you can think of. Revenue share amount from Youtube is a few times less than what Google search is making https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings...
- eek2121 4y ago
  Youtube is slowly killing itself with abusive revenue practices but ignore THAT bombshell for a moment and focus on why you are wrong. Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos.
  - jerrre 4y ago
    It would be a lot more valuable if you just explain your thoughts instead of creating a guessing game
  - KrishnaShripad 4y ago
    > Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos. Data for this? Rather people love to consume videos. Instagram, Tiktok, Twitch come to mind immediately. Not just Youtube.
bryans 4y ago
Why would it be a search engine's role to provide the entirety of every creators' livable wage? That would obviously be impossible for many reasons, and I don't see Yep making any claims about being a primary (or even significant) revenue source. Instead, they're proposing that the value of search comes from the end content, not the results page. The creator revenue stemming from that is inherently the appropriate amount. Inciting the notion that they're individually responsible for the whole of content creators' income only encourages more ads or even nefarious behavior -- which is completely antithetical to your own company's philosophy, so it's not clear why you're so publicly holding a competitor to a different standard.
- freediver 4y ago
  It seems we read the same article and understood it differently. The announcement post said : "Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return." To me this sounds like the idea of this model is to allow an average person doing casual blogging to make significant income? Given this premise, can we make it work? To be clear I absolutely love the idea, I think it sounds fair and in the spirit of the web that I would like to see. The web needs innovative ideas like this, unfortunately I do not see this concrete one being viable.
  - dotcoma 4y ago
    So every time someone clicks to that blog about container gardens, the writer/owner of the blog gets $ 0.25? Who pays? With money coming from where? And how bad will SEO efforts become to get their hands on that kind of money, which is 10 times (not 1,000 times, my mistake) more than that same blog would make with advertising, if we considered a CPM rate of $ 25 ?
    - bryans 4y ago
      For the record, freediver deceptively misquoted the blog post, and Ahrefs never claimed that those would be the revenue amounts -- they weren't even talking about their own company.
bryans 4y ago
I made my other comment about the disparaging qualities of your commentary, but I just wanted to point out that the numbers you're discussing are actually good for content creators. Incredibly good, actually. Presuming your DDG example of 100M/day @ $0.01, that would be $328M/year paid out to creators. Bandcamp currently pays out ~$75M annually, and nobody is declaring them "unviable." So, I can't imagine why you consider this amount to be "not much," particularly when it would be additional revenue for creators which is typically 100% absorbed by the search provider.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something? The profit is too low. And they're not saying they're going to provide a living wage, just an extra revenue stream. Just because that revenue stream isn't enough by itself to live on doesn't take away that it's a revenue stream and people who are indie hacking need to generate multiple revenue streams to provide security for themselves.
NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago
We live in a pyramid, so not everyone can live of art/sport. For instance there is 87 million tennis player in the world, but only 1000 or less players actually earn enough money to live comfortably. Wile most of the earnings is withing top 20. Production level are not enough to give everyone a life they would like to have.

viraptor 4y ago

Pages are not created equal and averaging numbers here seems to be of little use. In practice the popularity is likely closer to some exponential-like distribution. Similar to music streaming services. Lots of people wouldn't get anything but they probably don't expect anything either.

freediver 4y ago
I was using averages because this model is supposed to help the "average creator", those left behind in the current Google-economy model. "Whales" and "superwhales" (which is what as you correctly conclude this model would probably converge to too) already exist in Google-economy world so not really interesting to observe. They would just make the average creator make even less. This person for example (from their article) "Say, you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Imagine getting paid to share creative recipes, take photos and instruct website visitors on how they too can make amazing pancakes." Would make $3/month (+- order of magnitude) if Yep was ever to achieve DDG level of success.
- fastball 4y ago
  You put "average creator" in quotes but from my reading of their site Yep has not claimed they will help the "average creator", just "creators". If Yep shares a higher percentage of revenue with creators than Google, surely that is helping creators even if it doesn't mean you're achieving some sort of imaginary "no man left behind" standard for the average creator.
popcorncowboy 4y ago
If so, this quickly leads to the end-game of a dedicated industry that juices the ~~Ahrefs~~ Yep algo with bot armies and shady SEO tactics to push sites up the curve to capture this non-linear payout.

botsbreeder 4y ago

Not all content is equal. Good content require efforts, often efforts of a team. Youtube is a good example of how revenue share will work in practice. Some creators are getting millions there, some maybe hundreds. But as a consumer you can find good content for almost any topic you can think of. Revenue share amount from Youtube is a few times less than what Google search is making https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q1_alphabet_earnings...

eek2121 4y ago
Youtube is slowly killing itself with abusive revenue practices but ignore THAT bombshell for a moment and focus on why you are wrong. Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos.
- jerrre 4y ago
  It would be a lot more valuable if you just explain your thoughts instead of creating a guessing game
- KrishnaShripad 4y ago
  > Hint: it actually has almost nothing to do with the fact that a large portion of internet users don't like videos. Data for this? Rather people love to consume videos. Instagram, Tiktok, Twitch come to mind immediately. Not just Youtube.

bryans 4y ago

Why would it be a search engine's role to provide the entirety of every creators' livable wage? That would obviously be impossible for many reasons, and I don't see Yep making any claims about being a primary (or even significant) revenue source. Instead, they're proposing that the value of search comes from the end content, not the results page. The creator revenue stemming from that is inherently the appropriate amount. Inciting the notion that they're individually responsible for the whole of content creators' income only encourages more ads or even nefarious behavior -- which is completely antithetical to your own company's philosophy, so it's not clear why you're so publicly holding a competitor to a different standard.

freediver 4y ago
It seems we read the same article and understood it differently. The announcement post said : "Say Anne from Kentucky helps 4,000 people learn how to build container gardens via her Wordpress blog every month. She would receive $1,000 monthly from the search engine in return." To me this sounds like the idea of this model is to allow an average person doing casual blogging to make significant income? Given this premise, can we make it work? To be clear I absolutely love the idea, I think it sounds fair and in the spirit of the web that I would like to see. The web needs innovative ideas like this, unfortunately I do not see this concrete one being viable.
- dotcoma 4y ago
  So every time someone clicks to that blog about container gardens, the writer/owner of the blog gets $ 0.25? Who pays? With money coming from where? And how bad will SEO efforts become to get their hands on that kind of money, which is 10 times (not 1,000 times, my mistake) more than that same blog would make with advertising, if we considered a CPM rate of $ 25 ?
  - bryans 4y ago
    For the record, freediver deceptively misquoted the blog post, and Ahrefs never claimed that those would be the revenue amounts -- they weren't even talking about their own company.

bryans 4y ago

I made my other comment about the disparaging qualities of your commentary, but I just wanted to point out that the numbers you're discussing are actually good for content creators. Incredibly good, actually. Presuming your DDG example of 100M/day @ $0.01, that would be $328M/year paid out to creators. Bandcamp currently pays out ~$75M annually, and nobody is declaring them "unviable." So, I can't imagine why you consider this amount to be "not much," particularly when it would be additional revenue for creators which is typically 100% absorbed by the search provider.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> The idea sounds noble on paper but it seems that math does not check. Missing something? The profit is too low. And they're not saying they're going to provide a living wage, just an extra revenue stream. Just because that revenue stream isn't enough by itself to live on doesn't take away that it's a revenue stream and people who are indie hacking need to generate multiple revenue streams to provide security for themselves.

NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago

We live in a pyramid, so not everyone can live of art/sport. For instance there is 87 million tennis player in the world, but only 1000 or less players actually earn enough money to live comfortably. Wile most of the earnings is withing top 20. Production level are not enough to give everyone a life they would like to have.