Real Valley Stories: Search Marketing With the Open Directory Project

Editor’s Note: Part 12 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 11 talked about the time I got called into HR's office to meet with lawyers over industrial espionage. This time, a story involving gray hat search engine marketing in the early days of the Web.

DMOZ is now closed. 

Believe it or not, before the world of automated spiders that crawled the entire Web and ranked the results for your searches, much of the way we found content on the Internet was thanks to manual updates from an invisible army of directory editors. Yahoo! defined the initial dot-com era, with its hierarchical oracle making or breaking traffic downstream, as sites were organized and shuffled into categories by unseen text tweakers, much like the editors of Wikipedia try and keep its tens of millions of article pages up to date, with a seemingly fluid mass of edits to keep the live encyclopedia current.

But Yahoo! wasn't the only Web directory. Rich Skrenta and others, also behind Web 2.0 efforts Topix and Blekko, introduced the Open Directory Project, referred to as DMOZ, for it was hosted on the directory subdomain of the Mozilla.org site, with an objective of harnessing contributions from around the world (like Wikipedia), to build a directory, similar to Yahoo!, that could plug into any site that wanted to host one. In a time when many sites were seeking Internet traffic and riches by acting as the front page for the Web, attaching the open directory project to your portal could give you an edge and not require you to bring on a ton of staff.

As with Yahoo!'s directory, a company's inclusion in the DMOZ directory could act as a binary gate as to whether or not potential users would find you. In 1999, working as a Web marketing manager for a Web startup that offered internet faxing and conference calls, I found myself irked to see that our services were not included in DMOZ. Making things worse, the categories I would expect to see us listed in seemed slapped together and without an official owner. Given my understanding of the space and knowing our many competitors, I registered an account and requested to moderate the relevant category.

The DMOZ Internet Fax Listings from 1999 (via Archive.org)

Not too long afterward, I was given the option to update the category, including those of our competitors. As it was nearly two decades ago, I honestly don't remember if I used my company email or a Yahoo! email or equivalent, but I didn't try and disguise where I worked. My application had gotten through.

FaxCube from the year 2000.

When I did log in, I found the content in a state of abandonment. There wasn't much you could do with a site's listing. Give it a title, a link, and a short description, literally about a dozen words. It was fairly impossible to differentiate services from one another, especially in a commoditized space where the core function was pretty straight forward. But I cleaned up the descriptions for all the entries, including our competitors, to accurately display their offerings. Some offered email to fax services, while others offered the reverse. Some offered broadcast faxing. Some required a proprietary fax viewer, and others were completely Web based. That kind of thing.

When content was edited in DMOZ, edits would later propagate downstream. Sure enough, my colleagues noticed a spike in Web traffic to our main sites, with referrers coming from all the places DMOZ was set up. For no cost, I had a clear impact in our customer acquisition funnel, and maintaining the DMOZ became part of my ongoing work.

Later, DMOZ added the option to highlight two entries in the group, which were solely up to the moderator. This, of course, gave me the option to expand from a gray area, to clearly going over the line into promotion. It went without saying I thought our service was the best, and highlighted it at the top. I also chose to highlight a partner site (the Netscape Fax Center) that was white labeling our service, essentially the 1 and 1A positions.

This got even better when we soon realized DMOZ was fueling search results for AOL. The more people who searched for Internet Faxing on AOL, the better we were to see results.

DMOZ listings for Internet Telephony in early 2000. (Via Archive.org)

In early 2000, we introduced a new Web based conference call and meeting product. Addicted to the free traffic from DMOZ, my team asked me to see if I could get our content similarly included on whatever the equivalent was for Internet conferencing. I poked around, and, again, applied to be an editor for the Internet Telephony page. It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was pretty good.

Again, I got approved, and again, I added our sites, and again, I promoted our main site and a partner site to be included as the pair at the top of results. Again, we started to get plenty of Web traffic from DMOZ and its downstream partners, accounting for more than double digit percentage of our traffic to both properties. But this time, it wouldn't last long. Maybe it was the clear marketing copy promoting both services, but one day, I logged in and saw our service demoted to the standard results, with another in its place. I reversed the change, and it wasn't too long until there was a debate upstream as to whether these listings were in good faith.

PhoneCube, in all its glory, from 2000.

Not too long afterward, my moderation rights had been removed from both sections. I'd essentially been fired from my side job of gray hat SEO, long before most of us knew what that meant. And yes, my engineering peers lamented the loss of traffic, as our more organic listings, on AOL search and elsewhere, didn't carry as much weight, once we became one of the fold.

Had I just stayed content to include our services in the listings, or even just to stay a moderator of the less exciting Internet faxing space, it's possible I could have been editing text descriptions for our sites and our competitors indefinitely. But pushing our own products and our partner sites turned out too good to be true. The "Wild West" Internet traffic rush didn't last forever, and, as it turns out, neither did our products. I was laid off after we couldn't get a funding round closed at the beginning of 2001, and a few months later, the company was parceled off to become part of Oracle (see 2006 post). Some of my colleagues still work there nearly two decades later. As for DMOZ, it too shut down a few years ago, a relic in the world of Google and Facebook.

Disclosures: This whole post is a disclosure! I worked at 3Cube during this time. I work at Google now, a perceived competitor to whatever Yahoo! and AOL call themselves now. And as I work on Google Analytics, this is not a post about SEO to all you SEO/SEM folks.

You Don't Get Any Participation Medals for Just Showing Up

"I need some record of you being in this class," hissed my 8th grade math teacher, looking at me and pointing to my lowly 5% grade to date in his course after ten assignments, by far the lowest mark in the class. My not so glowing 50 points out of a possible 1,000 was the product of many days' not turning in homework, as my continued refrain of "I'll get to it tomorrow" started to become an impossibility to tackle.

Each day I told myself I'd eventually get to the previous day's assignments, taking a penalty for my lateness, but part of me knew I'd just float through the day to day and try to make it up on the tests. For me, it was proving I knew the answers - conveying mastery of the subject. Yet for my grade, it was proving that not only did I know the answers, but I was willing to do the work. Just showing up wasn't enough.

For the past 15 years, I've been working in Silicon Valley, and I've encountered an incredible mix of people who perform as if they are on different gears. Some work incredibly hard, and are driven to succeed at practically any cost, refusing to let traditional limits get in their way. Others seem almost crestfallen if they can't keep up with those gracing magazine covers simply by being in the right place at the right time. And the truth is that life's not perfect. There is an intersection of skill and luck that very often sees great employees at bad businesses punished for their career choices, while less impactful employees at incredible companies gain the benefit of their colleagues' work.

From the outside looking in, Silicon Valley might look like a technology-centric Disneyland, where the future can be experienced today, where dreams can get funded, and you can't walk down the sidewalk without knocking shoulders with millionaires. But every success story you read, and those people who become household names, be they Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Larry Ellison or Marissa Mayer, came not as a product of pure luck, but the application of effort against risk.

Risk Is Often Required If Something Is Worth Doing

I remember sitting around our corporate boardroom one afternoon ten or so years ago, as an account manager on our team explained why we had been unable to close a once-promising deal. He said, paraphrasing with some angst, "In his business, the IT manager's job is to reduce risk. At our stage, we're all about risk." And it was true. While our more established competitors didn't have all the whiz-bang capabilities our devices did, what they did offer was a track record of success, integration with top partners, security, and all those things that moved risk out of the data center. We had to look elsewhere to find customers more willing to take a bit and absorb some risk, in exchange for our differentiation.

Which brings us back to "just showing up".

I spent my first three years in the Valley working at two very small startups. The first didn't have any revenue, and some odd ideas. When the founder was let go, the sister company asked me to stay on, and we worked hard at bringing traditional office tasks to the Web. The work was good, and our customers liked our products, but we weren't growing fast enough. When we went out to raise a $10 million B round, we came up light, and that was the end of my tenure. But as we were plodding along with our incremental growth, it seemed like everyone around us was going public, making money and buying homes - which to us was pure fantasy. Some of our best engineers took other jobs, and spoke openly about the frustrations they felt when all their friends were getting rich, while we were still bringing our food in a bag lunch and eating at our desks.

Even in a bubble, showing up wasn't enough. At my next company, where I spent 8+ years, we had enough spikes and troughs to fill a novel. Maybe some day I'll write it. We scored several rounds of venture funding, several rounds of layoffs, and filed to go public, not once, but twice. The company eventually sold for a good amount after I had left, but not before a number of upstarts had soared past us, having much more profitable exits, at valuations anywhere from 4 to 5 what our exit had been. And while we could feel bad about not having hit a home run, I was all too aware of the many other players in our industry who had already gone bankrupt, or returned money to the original VCs, lacking a business model, and other former colleagues who had bounced from company to company in search of something that stuck.

I've always been raised with the mantra that nine out of ten startups fail. I've seen other ratios with different numbers, but the truth is that the overwhelming majority of small business concepts, even those with venture funding, don't have a positive exit, and it's a much rarer one that sees the founders and employees strike it big. For every market sensation like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tesla or Spotify, you have scads of others with software products few wanted, or website plays that have seen their URLs turn into dead links.

In the big race of keeping up with the Joneses, especially in an area ripe with exceptional people who have impacted history, seeing others' success can make it seem easy. Easy to start a company. Easy to start a venture fund. Easy to find customers. Easy to do practically anything. But it's not. I remember the wave of aspiring dotcom millionaires who came from around the country sporting MBAs, only to return when things got tough. And I remember the stories of former Business Development managers loading luggage at the airport when jobs were scarce. Success is not doled out equally and fairly, and the best products and best people don't always get rewarded. But the equation improves with incredible market study, exceptional effort, and the self-awareness to make change where it's required at the right time.

Do read up on the world's successful people, as I remember doing in college, checking out "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" from the Berkeley city library. Do make yourself aware of their smart strategies and innovative products. But don't forget the hard work and effort required that set them up with a greater likelihood to succeed. Or you'll be like I was in 8th grade -- getting dressed down publicly by my teacher who questioned why I was even there at all if I wasn't going to do the bare minimum.

Disclosures for fun: I worked at BlueArc from 2001-09 and owned options, as well as stock acquired in the company's 2005 AA round. These converted to shares when HDS purchased the company in 2011. I currently work at Google, and any references to their competitors or partners are just part of the story and presented without intended bias.

Fake Steve Jumps the Shark

One of the biggest blog stories in the last year has been the emergence of a Fake Steve Jobs, who takes on the personality of the true Apple CEO, and amusingly, sarcastically and vindictively touts all things Apple and rips all others, from Microsoft to Sun to Google. While many an attempt has been made to expose the author's true identity, no confirmations have been made.

As the Fake Steve rounds up incredible attention, linkage and talk, other fake blogs have sprung up, for Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, and even PodTech's Robert Scoble. But none have gained much traction. If Fake Steve were to possess an incredible ego, it could be said he seems to have cornered the market on pseudo-CEO blogging. That's the only logical reason I can think of why Fake Steve would be "jumping the shark" and faking the addition of a co-blogger, his friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. In Fake Steve's absence, Fake Larry has been posting for the last few days.

To me, this is a sure sign that Fake Steve is down from his peak. Just like real, consistent, well-written blogging can be tiresome and occasionally unrewarding, I would assume that consistent, well-written fake blogging can be similarly tiring. To add Fake Larry as a co-author tells me that Fake Steve has hit something resembling writer's block, or that a gap in Apple news (is there ever a gap?) has him grasping for straws.

Fake Steve is not such a great writer that we are yearning for a network of fake tech pundits under the author's umbrella. Fake Steve is great because the mercurial Steve Jobs is such a unique target. There's something to be said for focus.

Cisco Acquires WebEx, as Big Company Gets Bigger

From 1999 to early 2001, I got my feet wet working as the Web Marketing Manager at 3Cube, a Silicon Valley startup looking to enhance Internet Communications through Web-based faxing, conference calls, and Web meetings. While we toiled away trying to take on new customers one at a time, WebEx had raised tens of millions, asking RuPaul to tell the world in a best-forgotten Super Bowl ad that "We'd Better Start Meeting Like This". Needless to say, they won, and we lost, even if I still believe we had the lead in technology. Something about brand awareness and sheer execution really does work after all.

Yesterday, Cisco shook up the tech industry by announcing a $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx, seeing the traditional switch and routing company further diversify its business model. Cisco and others lauded the deal as an SMB (Small and Medium Business) play, as Cisco is trying to become more consumer friendly, with a goal of being less associated with corporate datacenters than in years past. The company even swapped out its well-known logo for a rounder, more Web 2.0 look and feel.

But beyond the surface announcements, for many of us who make a living in the Silicon Valley, this type of corporate consolidation raises some concerning questions. When the Big company (Cisco) buys a Smaller company (WebEx), will they continue to innovate, and will we ever see the business again?

History is littered with companies being swallowed up by monoliths like Cisco, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle, never to be seen again. Founders and key employees leave, and companies lose momentum. The number of companies from whom you can get a solution is limited, and hitting closer to home, there are fewer companies where you can get a job. In almost every corporate merger and acquisition, you see overlap and eventual layoffs.

Shortly after I left 3Cube in a layoff that took out Marketing, Sales and Business Development at the beginning of 2001, the company and its assets were purchased by Oracle, who had big hopes of adding desktop sharing and conference calling to its iMeeting product. Apparently they did, but you wouldn't know it.

I don't know of anybody who turns to Oracle for remote meetings and collaboration. Everybody uses WebEx. Now that Cisco has WebEx under its corporate umbrella, will they operate it as a separate service, with the brand name staying intact, or will it turn into the Cisco Meeting Service, powered by WebEx, and see a complete stalling in feature innovation? I have no idea. I don't think anybody has the answers.