Gravee Search Engine : Gravy Search Revenue Sharing Model
Received an email this week from a new search engine which is named after a food which will consist of about 10% of my caloric intake over the holiday season : GRAVY! Turkey gravy, chicken gravy, beef gravy… one of my favorite aspects of the holiday season is that it leads to being a grand excuse to be able to consume liters and liters of gravy.
This being said (please pass the gravy), the Gravee search engine has launched this week in Beta (yum, Beets & Gravy) with a business model which sounds a little bit like what Bill Gates was predicting last week : search engine revenue sharing.
Gravee fundamentally changes economic model for search by sharing ad revenue with content owners & publishers for being included in our index (i.e. kind of the opposite of paid inclusion) — because without them, we wouldn’t be able to build a search engine in the first place! In other words, their content is the underlying asset being monetized by search, and we believe they should be compensated.
Many have written recently about intellectual property rights, search business models, and how content owners (and even searchers) should/could be compensated. Some have asserted that search engines and other Web 2.0 start ups are perhaps taking advantage of content creators and contributors without compensating them. We’re intrigued by these questions, as well. And that’s why we created Gravee.
For more info on the Gravee search engine, I recommend reading their Gravee Blog (for some reason the words gravy & blog have led to a sudden loss of appetite) with their thoughts on revenue sharing and the Gravee AdShare program.
