Marketwatch's Bambi Francisco talks to Danny Sullivan who is bullish on the PPC ad market. Of course, the growth rate is inevitably slowing down, but Danny finds a lot of new people want to go to his conferences.(Via SearchEngineLowdown)

The interesting part of the article covers startups trying to be like NexTag.com and acquire leads at low cost, to resell them. NexTag uses search as one of the ways it acquires leads, then it auctions the leads (which are people clicking on stuff) to merchants like Mortgage sellers, Digital Camera sites, etc. It's a great business model, so it's no wonder people are jumping in.

"If aggregators continue to buy search keywords in bulk and resell the traffic/lead for 2X via an arbitrage model it will assert pressure on the search providers [Yahoo and Google] to go more downstream to acquire the marketers directly at some point if they want to continue to grow their top line revenue," said D.C. Cullinane, CEO and co-founder of thinkingVoice, a startup focused on a pay-for-call business model.

However, time has shown that once a marketing technique gets over-saturated, it loses effectiveness. I wonder if all these big bulk buyers will cause that to happen in the PPC market. I also wonder if the new people going to Search Engine Strategies will find it too hard to compete with the bulk buyers?

Give me some comments - what do you think about PPC growth and pricing? Will the bulk buyers squeeze out the regular businesses?

¶ 3/02/2005