Pass the Mike: Mark Harper & GenieKnows.com
Mark A. Harper
VP Strategic Relations
Mark joined IT Interactive Services as Director of Operations in July 2002. Prior to joining ITIS, Mark managed the Operational Budget and Accounting Office for the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in
Mark studied at The Kensington School of Business in
A proven team leader, Mark brings with him a wealth of international project management know-how, financial and operational management experience.
About GenieKnows.com
GenieKnows.com’s mission is to provide a rewarding search experience that delivers focused and useful information, while supplying advertisers with a gainful medium in which to drive targeted traffic to their web sites.
GenieKnows.com narrows the field of organic search results by developing niche-specific portals tailored for distinct searching communities, and also empowers a broad distribution network for advertisers by conveying meaningful, revenue-generating search results.
As the world enters a dynamic new era in Internet technology and online marketing, GenieKnows.com’s industry-leading search technology continues to provide innovative products and solutions to meet the ever-changing needs of the IT industry.
The Interview
Q. GenieKnows, it is fair to say, is a little fish in a big, big, BIG pond. The search industry is dominated by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Where does GenieKnows fit in, where does GenieKnows differentiate itself?
GenieKnows.com has been around since 1999 so we aren’t new to the online search marketing space. Consequently we have gained a lot of respect and brand awareness in the B2B space with the success of our online publisher / advertising platform. The recent change in emphasis for GenieKnows.com is to position ourselves as a destination search website for niche focused websites; 1. Local Search, 2. Health Search, and 3. Games Search Engines)
Q. GenieKnows has developed and invested heavily in its own technology. For those of us who have wondered just what goes into starting a search company, what can you share that will have most of us in awe at the amount of work and costs involved?
That’s a good question. For GenieKnows.com the starting point (several years ago) was developing closer links with the local Universities (Dalhousie and SMU located here in Halifax are most notable) and this then led to funding research through MITACS (Mathematical Institute for Technological Advancement in Computer Science). This then gave GenieKnows.com access to the faculty and students at
As we hired for key positions we found that our reputation was solid as a result of the relationships cultivated in the ‘early days’ and most of our technical staff are hired in from these universities.
For instance our Director of R&D and our CTO are PhD and Masters level graduates from
Q. Today, GenieKnows is using its search algorithms and technology to power 3 niche portals: Games, Health, and Local. What is the story behind going niche, and specifically going with these niche portals?
We realized some time ago that we would have to find a niche area in order to compete with the larger search engine companies and decided that we could gain more market share and credibility by concentrating on vertical search, or channel specific portals.
Local is the future game for the online search sector, games is and continues to be appealing to a wide and growing demographic and is after all fun. Health is an area of vital interest to everyone.
The technology that we deploy for our Games and Health search platforms (which is patent pending) was originally developed for our Local search engine.
Q. Google has established the fact and by some accounts really pioneered the idea that Search companies like GenieKnows can in fact make money from advertising and in turn also help content publishers (like bloggers) make money as well. What can you tell my readers who are either advertisers or publishers about the GenieKnows ad solutions? The benefits you see to using GenieKnows over (or maybe in conjunction with) some of the competition out there.
We are witnessing an incredibly strong interest from content providers and bloggers in the GenieKnows.com sponsored search publishing platform and believe that we have a much higher degree of flexibility than other players in the market. We can offer a broad array of implementation options that suits the publisher. This platform provides the publisher with sponsored search listings from our own advertisers directly and from other pay-per-click providers in one, simple to install, feed solution. Of course we are seeing a growth in advertisers buying search traffic in the Health, Games and Local sectors – but we are also very strong in a number of other markets, such as; Finance, Travel, Entertainment, E-Commerce and Pharmaceuticals.
Q. For smaller content providers like bloggers, is integration with your ad solutions as intuitive as something like Google Adsense? Do you hold any requirements for content providers? How does one get started?
There are lots of situations where we’ve seen a higher degree of relevancy when a publisher uses our content match solution for sponsored listings over than other provider’s solution. The relevancy of the sponsored search obviously helps with the click through rate and with revenue generation opportunities. We will also allow some degree of customization for partners that are monetizing their content and this helps our publishers out immensely. Sign up is quick and easy and we pride ourselves on being very responsive. Click here to sign up; http://www.genieknows.com/publishing/signup
Q. Your technology is used and demonstrated in the powering of your 3 portals, are the ads that you serve to content providers limited to specific content such as Games?
No – we power sponsored search listings alongside content and integrated into search results across all of the major search markets.
Q. Brand awareness, once you have a service in place, is the key behind any successful company. Recently GenieKnows and its Games Portal ran an impressive little promotion where you gave away $25K in game related gear to one lucky winner. Tell us, who came up with that wild prize/promotion, what were you expecting or hoping would be the result, and finally give your assessment of the final outcome.
The Ultimate Games Room (or UGR as we called it) was an interesting promotional campaign, initiated by a
We had a series of questions related to the Games market and the answers could only be found after using the Games Search Engine. The users needed to gather enough points to win the $25k UGR prize.
To be brutally honest we were not entirely happy with the over uptake and usage of the Games Portal after this campaign. We have found that viral marketing has produced much better results for us. The Games page has recently undergone a considerable revamp with lots of cool features and tools. The redesign of this page has helped with user stickiness; http://games.genieknows.com
The winner of the UGR has recently posted a blog entry here – as you can see he seems to be very happy with his loot!; http://games.genieknows.com/feature/unbelievable-games-room
Q. Any more big promotions in the works for any of your portals?
I’ll have to keep that under wraps – but we are often asked “when is the next party or competition?” and the answer is that we are planning more promotions this year to bring attention and usage of our products. The next promotion will be very different to anything that we’ve done and will (as always) have a fun twist to it.
Q. Your Local portal is still in beta, the publicly viewable site at the moment is somewhat barebones as far as functionality, what is coming up in the next few months that readers should keep an eye out for?
Since you asked me this question we have launched (March 4th 2008) v1.0 Local Search Engine; http://local.genieknows.com – and needless to say we are very proud of the effort and expertise displayed by our R&D and Product Development teams. This engine covers the
Q. In 2007, the Nova Scotia Government caught on to the great things happening at GenieKnows and put forward a $2 million payroll rebate which could see your company grow by 200 more employees over the next 5 years. With that many extra resources (potentially) what is in store for GenieKnows over the next few years? What type of employees/positions do you envision being created? How and where can people who are interested in your company apply for current and future consideration?
Yes – we were delighted to be recognized and awarded the tax-roll rebate incentive program by Nova Scotia Business Inc. This will give GenieKnows.com an added incentive to continue with our research and product development efforts here in
Q. Is there any interest brewing in GenieKnows technology from some big industry players? Anything or anyone you can share?
To be honest we do receive a lot of interest from various industry players (and have deals in place with many of them). It is fair to say that other online marketing companies are keeping a watchful eye on the work we are doing on the technological front.
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