Is the market going to be dominated even further by pay per click listings?
Pay per click will continue to be extremely important, with paid inclusion also becoming a key factor. However, fears about the market being dominated by sponsored listings to the detriment of organic listings are unfounded at this stage. There are two major reasons for this:
History of advertising . An interesting comparison was made by Stacy Williams between the current results on Google and the ratio of content to adverts in periodicals dating back to the 1850s. Throughout this period, there has remained a roughly 55:45 split between editorial and advertising content. This is unlikely to change significantly among search engines, as users expect to see both in order to the able to make a judgement about which web site to visit first.
The FCC also has strong guidelines about labelling to differentiate between sponsored and organic search results. Any major search engine solely serving up results on a "who bids highest" basis would be likely to fall foul of these guidelines. Yahoo at present appear to be getting away with their model of using paid inclusion and sponsored results. Google has stated that it has no plans for this at present, although if it was to start this, the implications could be severe.