Dragonfly Media Curacao

The past few years we have seen Curacao move forward on the internet. We see all kinds of start-ups, new projects by old companies and an increased interest for websites and internet marketing. Not only the hospitality business is booming on Curacao, but the internet business as well.

With all these advances and the good things that result from them we also see the hacks, the snake oil salesmen and the people that just don’t know any better ride the same wave. Especially this last week we have encountered the good (luckily), the bad and the very ugly.

The Good
Earlier this week we got an email through a contact about a Curacao map web-application. It is built in Flash and is the first well-built local map application that we have seen so far. With this application you can find any street, neighborhood and important city center in Curacao with the click of a button. Not only does it work like a charm, but it also looks very good.

We spoke with one of the developers today and he told us about the idea and the goals of this website. We were especially impressed with the fact that they used the government’s data to build the map instead of just copying over one of the maps you buy in a store (so, there are no copyright issues). They are currently working on monetizing the website and they have some pretty solid ideas on how to grow this organically and on what kinds of functionality they should add in time.

The Bad
The bad was an instance where someone abused the people’s lack of knowledge about search engines. You often hear people thump their chest because they are “no.1 in Google”. They usually conveniently forget to mention that the phrase they are number one for is such an obscure phrase that it gets maybe 5 searches per week and has maybe 10 search results.

We think it’s not a bad thing per sé that people do this because it signals that there is an interest in SEO and people realize the importance of it. Gaining knowledge is a process which you always begin like a blithering ignoramus. Once people learn more, they will make the distinction between solid SEO and the hack (yes, we tend to be of the positive persuasion).

This kind of chest-thumping becomes ‘the bad’ when people combine it with pointing fingers.  This is what happened earlier this week. A person in a local newspaper pointed the accusing finger at a local company because he thought that he was doing a better job than they were and he should get credit for it. His proof of doing a good job was that his website was number 2 for an obscure phrase in another language and the company’s website was nowhere to be seen. What he conveniently forgot to mention was that the company he was attacking is number 1 in Google in that language for the most important search word (not three-word phrase) in the niche…..

The Ugly
‘The ugly’ was a website that is so bad that it apparently hurts even the search engines’ eyes (which is quite a feat). The website can’t be found with a search engine without actually using the site’s URL as the search phrase. Even though the website is visually impairing and SEO-deficient this is not the reason I’m giving it the ‘ugly’ predicate.

The reason this website is ugly, is that the people behind it are trying to manipulate potential advertising clients with the oldest ‘look at how may visitors we have that are actually hits and not real people’-tactic in the book.  In an email to the potential client (whom we happen to advise on internet marketing) they offered to put some banners and content of the client on their website in exchange for a substantial sum of money.

In the email they said that the website had already gotten more than a million visitors in the past year. When we looked at the website we saw the lack of SEO, the visitor-unfriendly design and the utter lack of back-links. It was (very) hard to believe that this was one of the most visited websites of Curacao. So, we did some searching and eventually found the website’s statistics. It turned out that the website in question only had slightly more than 100 visits per day or about 40,000 visits in the last year. The only number in their statistics that was above 100,000 was the amount of hits in the last year which were caused by the insane amount of (flashing) images on the website.

An added issue with the statistics in this case was that these were log-generated statistics. Log-generated statistics look at the server logs for a website and turn these into numbers and graphs. The problem here is that this includes visits from search engine spiders and the other robots that scour the internet. So, only a percentage of this website’s visits are actual people….

If we look at our own statistics (we have both log-generated statistics and Google Analytics) we see that the ratio of actual people vs robots is about 1 vs 10. If the same ratio applies to this other website then it would mean that their actual amount of visits is about 4,000 per year which is a far cry from the ‘more than a million visitors’ they advertise with. In our eyes this is very ugly.

To be perfectly clear: we do not think that the internet business on Curacao is in a particularly bad shape. Whenever and wherever something is growing fast you see these type of things cropping up. It is a ‘natural’ part of the human psyche to want to ride the wave, even when not everybody know what they’re doing.

When the Spanish and Portuguese were busy discovering Latin America, there were all sorts of rumors about ‘El Dorado’ and these rumors motivated a lot of people to go on ill-advised treks through the jungle which got a lot of people killed for nothing. The bad and the ugly can be compared to these adventurers. They want to get ahead, but haven’t figured out yet that you need more than a big mouth to find El Dorado online. Luckily there are also many (internet) companies on Curacao that actually know what they’re doing.

NB: sorry for not naming names for the bad and the ugly. It is not our intention to bash people or companies. The above is meant to be purely educational.

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under General, Internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.