Here is episode 102 with industry vet Phillip Thune.
Phillip Thune’s Deep History In Search:
Phillip Thune is the current CEO of Textbroker and has been for over 10 years, but he goes back further in the search space including working for FindWhat in early 2000s. FindWhat, also known as Miva, was a competitor of Google Ads before Google launched AdWords. FindWhat competed directly with GoTo, aka Overture, which was ultimately acquired by Yahoo. So FindWhat was a number two player behind Overture, that was until Google launched AdWords. We briefly talked about the old days of what happened with the lawsuits between Yahoo and Google and also FindWhat around patent infringement for search ads. He was pretty frugal in how he ran FindWhat, despite the lavish parties going on in the space those days.
What Textbroker Does:
Textbroker is now his focus and he described how the business works and who Textbroker works for. In short, Textbroker writes content for companies, not just for SEO purposes but probably heavily for SEO purposes – he said 90% of the requests are SEO related. Textbroker now has about 100 employees, and the growth of content demand is always growing he said. Phillip is an expert on search, the industry and also now on content marketing – specifically seeing trends through the content requests.
Running The Business:
The data he has access to our those trends is impressive but what impresses me more is the metrics he uses to manage his company. That is, he can see all the content requests, what bandwidth is available and how he uses that to ensure content quality and demand go hand in hand. He explained that often when content demand is high, he will see those content writers availability goes up with it. The way he is on top of his business is something that I find inspiring. Phillip has written and reviewed content editorial in the past but does that super rarely. And it is a good thing for a CEO to do, to put his feet in the shoes of the writer or the customers.
More to come….
Phillip Thune can be followed on LinkedIn or on Twitter @PhillipThune.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.