Ex-Yahoo! Exec Greg Coleman's New Web Vision: Re-Mapping Search with NetSeer

amp160This month comScore reported a first Google had become the most popular Web site in the US A slim margin of less than a halfmillion unique users separated the search giant from rival Yahoo Between the two a total of some 282 million users had visited during the month of April alone But what39s most astonishing is that fifty percent of these searches aren39t monetized Los Angelesbased NetSeer operating in stealth since 2006 aims to change that In an exclusive interview with JackMyers Media Business Report new NetSeer President and CEO Greg Coleman explained a new vision for monetizing online search and explained the strategies being implemented by NetSeer which he believes could add a valuable new dimension to search technologyLast fall Coleman announced his departure from Yahoo as EVP for Global Sales Coleman took Yahoo39s ad sales from 500M to nearly 7B over a sevenyear period During his sixmonth transition from Yahoo Coleman had the latitude to carefully assess what he wanted out of his next position While there was no shortage of feelers from portals established and startup digital companies and magazines quotwanting to go digitalquot he realized he quotwanted an adventure and something that is potentially going to be very very bigquot He told suitors at the outset that quotunless they gave me the top operating job I wasn39t interestedquot This wasn39t an ego trip quotA transformative agentquot believes Coleman quotcan never be subservient to the core business Unless you are running it you shouldn39t do it You have to lead the changequotExecutive search firm Heidrick ampamp Struggles advised him to check out a Southern California startup NetSeer cofounders Behnam A Rezai and Vwani Roychowdhury two UCLA PhD39s had remapped the entire Internet in a way totally distinct from either Google or Yahoo using concepts rather than keywords At the outset of their research the NetSeer founders had no intention of solving the ad monetization problem Rather they were studying how communities formed on the Web In 2006 they had their Eureka moment In the process of parsing relationships and connections they discovered that they had actually reengineered how the Internet was formed They had stumbled onto something of great magnitude in indexing the whole Internet their algorithm extracted concepts off the page as opposed to keywordsColeman39s background as head of worldwide sales for Yahoo made it transparent to him that there was a need to improve in every metric including relevancy efficiency ROI and cost per click Here was a tool that offered not merely an incremental improvement like Google39s AdSense but could be a breakthrough Coleman performed due diligence experts reported test results that were quotincredibly dramaticquot The object of the testing was to put conceptual headtohead against keyword mapping They found Coleman reports quotthat in a significant percentage of those unmonetized queries we found relevant conceptsquot Therefore those ads held monetary potential that NetSeer could tapAs an illustration until recently quotNorth Polequot had no ads associated with it Using the black box that NetSeer refers to as its quotKnowledge Bankquot in which it has indexed some 5B Webpages concepts like quotSanta Clausquot quotletters to Santaquot and trips to Antarctica were revealed These were quotclear intentionsquot says Coleman quotthat were not apparent with conventional search enginesquot This discovery spoke to potential for algorithmic search help with quality which is nonmonetizable as well as content matchFor Coleman there was still a leap of faith Could NetSeer scale Could he build a business around it Here39s how he decided to go forward quotWe created a pact with the founders the VCs and the team itself now 27 and counting that we39re building a business that would be selfstandingquot he recalled quotWe are not creating something to dress up and sell I39ve seen too many companies do that and crash and burnquotLeveraging a Rolodex drawn from over twenty years in sales Coleman introduced NetSeer to heads of agencies search engine marketers and other search advertisers To his delight quoteveryone was willing to testquot While his small team is looking to hire a CFO and heads of business development and engineering Coleman maintains that a first priority is to bring on board thirty to forty engineers since quotWe believe that we will be testing and backfilling for some very large assignments with the Big Guys players in portals search engine marketers publishers as well as companies in the parking space domain the niche that monetizes misspellings and folks entering search terms not URLs in their search boxquotquotWe have to be ready for prime time to reach a critical mass to operationalize while on a parallel track we recognize that we have to invest in and upgrade our Knowledge Bankquot he says NetSeer had its first round of funding in 2006 via ONSET Ventures and Mission Ventures Coleman reports that they will have a second round later this year even though he is not fundraising at this timeColeman embraces NetSeer as a technology solution As such Job 1 is executing proof of concept delivering an incremental increase in revenuesRather than staff up with hundreds of salespeople and this is counterintuitive for someone with a lifetime in sales he39s willing to outsource sales rather than hire hundreds of salespeople This focus suggests Coleman quotshould create a path A new technology that could do something that large established brands are unable to doquot At present NetSeer is testing with one of the portals and companies in the parking space domain area Coleman believes that these results available in four months or so will act as a compass for NetSeer39s way forwardquotWe will use our resourcesquot he concludes quotto create products in product management and product marketingquot For now quotwe have to put points on the boardquot Conceptual mapping can add efficiency relevancy and better conversions to search Even in an economic downturn Coleman is unwavering quotall forms of performancebased advertising search will only growquot

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Ex-Yahoo! Exec Greg Coleman's New Web Vision: Re-Mapping Search with NetSeer

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