This the studipest thing I’ve read in a long time: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

Search engines are hurting content companies… wha-wha-what!??!!? Last I checked 10-20% of our traffic can from search engines (depending on the blog), and a significant portion of our revenue came from Google Adsense.

Content providers should kiss the ground search engines walk on because they have eliminated the need for smaller content providers to have a marketing budget! Produce great content for as litle as six months and you’ll get traffic–compare that to the magazine or newspaper world. Exactly.

The fact that search engines make money money along the way doesn’t take away from our ability to make money. In fact, many of our advertisers tell us they found us because they were searching for themselves or their products and found our blogs.

The fact that some folks can game a search engine doesn’t matter because the search engines are–at the end of the day–ahead of this problem.

It’s not a zero sum game. Advertisers have a lot of money to spend, and in many cases they can’t get all the traffic they need from cost per click sites. Advertisers still want to be in a nice branded place–like Engadget, Autoblog, TVSquad, etc.

I don’t want to be in the search business and I don’t care if they make money. If they make money they can make their service better and send me more readers… if I have more readers I make more money. A rising tide lifts all boats–case closed.