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Why Leapfish Will Not Succeed

Leapfish is a recently created alternative search engine designed to take the best of Google, Yahoo, and Bing (live), and combine them into one very simple search engine. The end result is surprisingly convenient and easy to use. Although it does seem like a winner at first glance, here are some reasons why I think the website will fall flat on it’s face.

1. Advertising Strategy. To combat Google’s pay-per-click advertising, they have targeted small-mid sized businesses and sold them permanent placement for a high introductory rate plus a 5% annual fee. Because their ad strategy doesn’t weigh in the relevance of the landing page like Google’s does, and anyone can buy a top spot, when searching on leapfish a whole lot of users will find highly irrelevant or outdated websites. This will kill the leapfish user retention rate.
2. Copyright Infringement. Their website takes Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s search results and displays them right on the leapfish homepage. Once the other sites catch wind of this I’m sure they will combat their approach with legal action. This is my own logic that has lead me to this assumption- I’m not a legal expert, but it just seems wrong to me that their content is 100% generated by other search engines.
3. People like me who retort when struck by poor sales or customer service. Yes I had a bad experience with the salespeople who called me to offer their advertising services. They lead me in with a free link which turned out to be a lie, not a good way to earn my trust. They did a lot of talking about the achievements of their company without addressing my needs as an advertiser, or answering simple questions like, “Can you give me any information on how many searches you have a month for a particular keyword?” Or, “Do you have some kind of trial period to see if I would get any clicks with my ad?”

I think my typing is keeping my girlfriend up right now- she’s tossing and turning and making “I’m annoyed” sighs.

Time to go!

Sorry leapfish.com, maybe you will wow me in the future and I will regret not dropping $5,000 for one of your keywords.