There was a very popular idea some time ago: "Create your own custom made Pay-Per-Click search engine and make extra money from your web site". At first sight that idea looks very attractive. You can buy your own custom made PPC search engine for between $100 and $900. It is even possible to find free Pay-Per-Click search engine scripts in the Internet. So, it is not a problem to get PPC search engine script and add new functionality to your web site. Customers will open up accounts, add funds and bid on targeted keywords. They will pay for clicks and receive new visitors and you will make extra money from your web site. It looks fine, but... Unfortunately, it is just a theory.
Let's review that idea from the point of view of PPC search engine customers, not from the point of view of webmaster. The customer needs to pay some minimum to open up an account and then spend that money for bidding. What the customer will obtain in reality?
1. Cheap bids. Most likely, clicks from your new PPC search engine will start out at 0.01 cent, because the number of customers will be quite low at first.
2. Traffic. Well, it depends... If you incorporated custom made PPC search engine to the existing web site with good traffic than the customer can expect considerable number of visitors from your web site. In opposite case, when you created new PPC search engine from scratch, it will be some episodic clicks.
3. Some bonuses. This feature depends from marketing tricks that you will use to attract customers. It may be $10 - $20 that the customer may use to bid on keywords at every new opened account. Such feature will cost you nothing, but may be important for the potential customer, especially if you started new PPC search engine. It may be some kind of referral system where your customers can gain credits to their accounts by referring others to your PPC search engine.
What is most important for the Pay-Per-Click search engine customers? It is traffic. People advertise through PPC search engines to get more traffic at their web sites. Therefore, it will be very hard to attract new members for your PPC search engine, if you cannot propose considerable number of new visitors for their web sites. So, if you want to start new Pay-Per-Click search engine, then you should be ready to spend some considerable amount of money on advertising and promotion. In opposite case you will not be able to propose traffic to members of your PPC search engine.
As you can see, attracting idea may be quite troublesome at a closer view. Customers will not spend time and money to advertise through Pay-Per-Click search engine, which does not give traffic. They will better use something like Google AdWords or Overture. I think that idea of custom made Pay-Per-Click search engine is dead except the cases when you add PPC functionality to the existing web site with good traffic or when you can propose some new fresh idea that will attract advertisers.
