Lot’s of talk this morning about Alexa opening up its index. It’s part of a welcome trend to provide APIs to search engines. I’m not sure of the economics of Alexa’s offering though…at least in terms for many of us that are part of the Google Economy.
It goes something like this: build or augment a site with Alexa’s data, strap on Google ads, collect money, pay Alexa.
This relationship will work if the cost for the value gained from the Alexa data is (significantly) less than the money earned from Google.
I’m sure there are other unique approaches where the equation is different, but this is what comes to mind in terms of what I see many people doing now.
For these people, maybe reverse revenue sharing would make more sense. What about splitting the Google ad dollars? If you generate $10 from Google ads, you get $9 and Alexa gets $1.