It sucks being a competitor to Google Search.
Google’s overall traffic share compared to all other search engines worldwide is estimated at 91.9% in 2022.
Over 90%!
That means all other search engines combined don’t even break the 10% barrier. Those competitors include Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and more.
Trying to compete with Google Search is bonkers, really.
More on that in a minute.
Still, every now and then, we see a new company trying exactly that. Competing with Google Search.
Case and point: Yep.com
What’s unique about Yep.com
Yep.com is not just another search engine.
Others try to make a name for themselves by adding unusual features like planting trees (Ecosia) or heavily focusing on privacy first (DuckDuckGo).
Yep.com isn’t planting trees, but they are invested in privacy. That’s not the exciting unique feature, however.
Truly unique is Yep.com’s profit sharing model.
Imagine this: Your blog appears in search results like on Google, but whenever a user clicks and views your blog, you earn money.
How?
Yep.com, like Google, will mostly rely on advertisements for search results. That’s how the internet works.
In contrast to Google, however, you’re not forced to insert AdSense ads on your blog or website to benefit from search engine traffic.
No.
Yep will share the profits from any clicks. And a large percentage too.
90% of profit will go to content creators.
Comparison
Let’s compare that to YouTube for example. In the case of YouTube ads, only about half of the money goes to the content creator, the other half goes to Google.
Google Search is even worse. Without AdSense, zero dollars of the profit goes to the creator. Google crawls the web, displays your content, and pockets all profits. Even with AdSense, profit shares are low.
Examples
Think about this:
Let’s say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers. — Yep.com
Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They’d be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary. — Yep.com
The incredible upside of this
Blogs, websites, content hubs, and knowledge databases like Wikipedia would not need to put ads on their web pages individually and with it, disturb the user experience.
No more ugly, distracting AdSense blocks on our websites. Hallelujah!
Another unique upside of Yep.com
Yep.com is not a newbie in terms of web crawling and search result analysis. Far from it.
Yep.com was brought to life by Dmitry Gerasimenko, the CEO and founder of Ahrefs, and his team.
You might know Ahrefs. It’s a popular and widely-known SEO service platform that offers tools and features used by millions of people. The Ahref bot is the second-largest web crawler in the world, only behind Google’s.
That’s a strong basis for Yep.com
Let’s recap:
- Yep.com is built on Ahrefs technology.
- It focuses on two main concepts: privacy and profit-sharing.
- It offers a private and unbiased, simplistic search engine
What’s not to like?
Will Yep.com succeed
Heck, no. But wait.
It’s Google they’re competing with here. The parent company, Alphabet crossed $200 billion in annual revenue 2021. Search market share globally is 91.9%.
That monopoly is hard to overcome.
Yep.com and all other competitors dwarf in comparison.
It’s the ugly truth.
Honestly, the only company I could see doing something about this would be Apple.
Here’s the kick-ass dream all content creators could dream, though:
What if Apple bought Yep.com!
I mean, 🤯
Of course, there are a plethora of issues with this idea. The main being, Apple is not really interested in becoming an ad-serving business (yet).
Apple does ads, no doubt. Its own ads, in particular, but they serve and have served ads from others in various places, products, and services over the years, but serving ads has never been a core business model of Apple.
I doubt this will change. Nevertheless, we can dream.
Other issues:
Yep.com Shortcomings
Yep.com is newish. The algorithm is in its early days. That means it’s far less sophisticated than Google’s, in part due to its privacy focus.
The most obvious hurdle will be quality-control of search results (to ensure great content and creators get paid, instead of content farms, SEO hacking pros, or plagiarized material).
Also, Yep.com is heavily relying on old-school metrics for the algorithm like
- quantity of backlinks
- total number of referring domains
- exact and close match anchor text numbers
In contrast, Google, with its massive data resources (and lack of privacy), offers qualitatively better results by eliminating SEO-content mills and unnatural keyword usage from top search results. Google also offers location-based results, personalized picks, individualized ads, and related search terms, questions, and knowledge graph entries.
That’s a lot. Because Google knows a lot about you and me.
Yep.com doesn’t. That limits the search results severely.
The bottom line
I like to dream, but I can’t imagine Yep.com beating or coming close to being a viable Google competitor.
I hope I’m wrong because I’d love to see them succeed with a business model that would give 90% of profit back to the creators and publishers. They’re the ones who make the content. Google Search and all the others only display it.
The only way I can see Yep.com succeed is with the help of the only other company willing and capable to take on Google. Apple.
Even Microsoft wasn’t able to do it. Bing is large but has no chance against Google Search.
It sucks being a Google Search competitor. But I hope they keep trying.
