An Interview With Jason Calacanis: Kelsey ILM 07

If you don’t follow Jason this is probably a worthless read. He has developed quite a reputation in the SEO community and so this post is for my SEO readers out there.

Jason was interviewed at the Kelsey conference last week by Peter Krasilovsky. I got to this panel late but here are my notes:

He doesn’t think the value of advertising on Facebook is as valuable as search engine advertising because the intent of the user is different. Ads are competing with “Bambi” – interesting people and applications. Your local Toyota dealership is not going to get more attention than a hot chick.

Geodomains: He doesn’t like the landing page business where people type in a domain name and get a page full of ads. It doesn’t seem like building long-term value.

Mahalo: We want to do the top third of search and leave the long tail search to Google and the others. One person can spend five hours creating a page and serve one million people. 50 people per day apply to be “guides” to write pages. They are paying 400 freelance people/month to create pages for them plus 50 full-timers.

Why didn’t Weblogs, Inc’s local blog play work? According to Jason “Local is too hard”.

Inevitably the conversation came around to Jason’s views on search engine optimization. Earlier this year Jason had been quoted re his negative feelings towards SEOs. He clarified that his was only talking about the “bad ones in bad suits” and then admitted that there were “good ones” too (but they probably could use new suits). My favorite quote was when he said “I am one of the better SEOs”.

I don’t think he meant that in any bragging sort of way but rather as a statement that he has been able to generate significant search engine referrals.

His suggestion was that SEOs should start calling themselves “Traffic Optimizers” or something like that because “SEO” has a lot of reputation issues.

Let me just state here for the record that Peter Krasilovsky should have his own TV interview show. He brings new meaning to the word “deadpan”. Sort of like Charlie Rose meets John Stewart, or maybe Lewis Black? Note to Peter, start putting up some video on your site!

Tomorrow, more thoughts on the loco local search biz.