93% of Dow Jones Companies squatted in US Search Engines

French Search Engine Marketing Firm, CVFM (Creating Value For the Millennium) released a new study that shows that 93% of Dow Jones companies are victim of positionsquatting, a new controversial marketing practice.

In 2001, all major search engines begun offering a bidding system for first positions in their search listings. Most of them have subcontracted the sale and management of these positions to a third party called Overture. Most of the time, the advertiser that is ready to pay the highest price per visitor (price per click) gets the first position. Thanks to a real time bidding system, first positions on a given keyword can change hands within a few minutes.

At first, online advertisers asked to get positions for their site on common keywords like cars, hotel reservation, travel, etc... but soon, some have realized that numerous online searches were linked to brands and trademarks. So they began, they began to bid for positions on brand searches to divert internet visitors from official brand sites to their own site. That is called "positionsquatting".

Taking into account the number of trials that have involved in the past years, domain names cybersquatters and sites using their competitors brands as meta-keywords, one could have think that search engines would have set up brand protection programs in the frame of their paid positioning systems.

In the contrary, CVFM latest study about positionsquatting shows that 93% of Dow Jones companies have been stolen the first position in major US portals like Yahoo.com. They are therefore loosing thousands of internet customers each day, who are diverted to the positionsquatters websites. The commercial seems to be tremendous.

Strangely enough, major firms like Disney, which had been in the past very protective about their brands, have yet done nothing to get rid of positionsquatters, which occupy at the first three positions in any US portal on the word "Disney".

Some firms have began counterattacking like Hewlett Packard, for which the commercial impact of positionsquatting directly translates in sales lost as people looking for Hewlett Packard products maybe diverted to comparison shopping sites, showing competitors products. Hewlett Packard so began to bid to get back the first position and to pay for each visitor to stay in top position. But the bidding system can dramatically increase the cost of traffic overnight: on may the 24th, Hewlett Packard used to be paying $0.13 per visitor to keep the first position. Positionsquatters bid over in the following days. One week end after, Hewlett Packard had to pay $0.36 per visitor. Positionsquatters bid over again and again. On June, 7th, the price of clicks on searches for "Hewlett Packard" skyrocketed to $1.35.

Microsoft has also decided to counter-attack by bidding over the positionsquatters, which had bought positions on searches for the word "Microsoft". But, Microsoft, victim of positionsquatting, had become a positionsquatter itself. Its online travel subsidiary, Expedia.com itself had been bids for positions on the word "Disney" for several weeks and has paid each Disney search click between $1.73 and $2.65.

CVFM provides Search Engines marketing services as well as Domain Names protection services for International customers. It has also built a special Positonsquatting service to help companies protect their traffic.

http://www.positionsquatting.com
http://www.cvfm.com

Contact: Raphael Richard
Tel : 00 33 148 240 337
Fax : 00 33 148 240 330
CVFM, Paris, France
32, rue de paradis
75010 Paris