Re: <a href="" meta="">

> One reason for this is probably that commercial web sites are not in the

Actually, the biggest real world (i.e. commercial) reason why hidden
reccommendations of a site would not be attractive to most people is
that they only business model that makes sense is a commission based one
(this already happens for overt reccommendations - Amazon, I believe,
pays sites when people purchase as results of a link to their site,
and it is the basis of how best buy sites work as a business).

Such a business model wouldn't encourage honest appraisals - it has
the same problem as magazine publishers have; they can't afford to
offend their advertisers or encourage non-commercial alternatives.
Probably a closer analogy is "indpendent financial advisers" who will
prefer the product with the higher commission.  (The consumer side
of the market forces equation means that they can't be completely
driven by commission rates/advertising revenue.)

The other business models for referrals rely on people visiting the
referring site, generally, to be presented with paid advertising, or
at least have market survey data extracted from them (if only be
examining what they are asking about and where they go next);
or on a subscription service, where the ability to log in to the site
needs to be proved to ensure the subscription has been paid.

Even academics need to maintain publicity of their sites, in order to
influence funding bodies.

That leaves amateur sites.  Most of which would not be sophisticated
enough to contribute to such a mechanism, and the ones that would be
sophisticated enough would, at least for me, be the sites I wanted to
look at, rather than any commercial sites to which they were referring.

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2002 03:53:43 UTC