21 October 2000

Could Espotting be the saviour of the website world?

Espotting.com, the UK's answer to search engines, has announced an affiliate deal with dotmusic, the UK and Europe's largest youth website with an ABC electronic audit of 1.24 million unique visitors per month (July 2000). By adding Espotting search to their site, dotmusic also adds another revenue stream to their model. Espotting's pay-for-placement search engine is already generating revenue for popular sites such as virginstudent.com, ebop, GSMplus, Loquax, and Net-ware. It's why Espotting call their affiliate search boxes 'RevenuEngines'.

Dotmusic has opted for Espotting's personalised search, the top level of affiliation available, whereby the search results are fully integrated into dotmusic's site. Espotting's affiliate scheme is free to join, and by adding the search facility to their site, dotmusic can now earn valuable revenue from a service that traditionally has been costly to provide.

virginstudent.com, the complete website for those in education has also taken advantage of Espotting's revenue generating model. Espotting search results are fully integrated into virginstudent.com's 're:search' and 'free money' sections.

"These deals show the variety of different sites that can benefit from Espotting's advanced search capabilities. Week by week the scheme is growing - at present we are adding about 100 affiliates a week. Our aim is to make our search box the most profitable square inch on other people's sites!" comments Daniel Ishag, CEO of Espotting. "In the case of dotmusic, Espotting's proposition and product fit perfectly with their aim to offer the most up-to-date music related news and reviews on the web. Dotmusic users will now be able to take advantage of Espotting's excellent technology and European relevant search to find exactly what they want. In turn this can only encourage returns to the site!"

"We project that approximately 10% of dotmusic's traffic will search with us" Ishag continued. "On that basis, dotmusic can expect to earn additional revenues of about £15,000 per month. This figure incorporates both revenues earnt from searches (on a CPC basis) and additional banner ad revenue since our search results appear on their site. And we're still in our early days - so we can expect the CPC figure to increase as time goes on."

"The dotmusic and Espotting partnership will make the site particularly appealing to our music fans. All search requests are carefully monitored by the Espotting team to give the best possible search results." Says Kathryn Wayman, dotmusic's sales director " which in turn means better value for our customers and a more productive web experience."

Since launch on September 13th 2000 Espotting has already reached the one million page impressions mark and currently has search terms being bid upon by advertisers such as Amazon.co.uk, FT.com, peoplesound.com and Lloyds TSB. The recent partnership with US search giant, Kanoodle has helped to boost traffic through the UK site to record levels.

Dotmusic is the online destination for breaking music news, charts, reviews, webcasts and exclusive interviews for all types of music.

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