For One Middle-Market Firm, Search Remains the Engine for Growth

“And behind this curtain there lies that rarest of all middle-market companies — the Internet search firm!” Or so a carnival barker might hazard in this age of search behemoths such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

However, middle-market search firms — both midsize and small — continue to compete and sometimes even thrive in the long shadows of their plus-size peers.

Such is the case with 10-year-old eZanga of Middletown, Delaware, which has steadily canvassed the online advertising industry while specializing in a pay-per-click offering for websites.

“We don’t tend to deal with Weather.com or Facebook.com — they prefer to deal with the big boys like Google — but we tend to find smaller niche sites that, it turns out, are great. But meanwhile we’re still dealing with a lot of different people. We probably have somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 unique sources of traffic flowing into our network every day,” says eZanga CEO Rich Kahn, whose firm of 25 employees sailed past $10 million in annual sales recently, having jumped by 253 % between 2009 and 2011, according to Inc. magazine.

Kahn says that eZanga’s typical advertisers are for the most part smaller in size than Google’s, but there remains a wide variety.

“We have local doctors who are looking to spend $200 every three months, and large companies like Sony and Hitachi that will be looking for big buys — and every type of company in between,” says Kahn.

One advertising-related area where eZanga has continued to advance its technology offerings is in the detection of click fraud, or when a person or computer program imitates a legitimate computer user and clicks on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having an actual interest in what’s being advertised. Part of what eZanga developed to combat click fraud is a type of “filtration system.”

“Basically, we discovered a unique way to identify this type of traffic coming into our network and block it before it hit our customer. Normally, fraud is found later, and you end up giving a credit back. We’re now able to identify the fraud in real time, so the customer doesn’t even see the traffic hit,” explains Kahn, who is an outspoken critic of social media networks that are increasingly competing for the same advertising dollars.

“Advertising is just not the way to go with those types of networks. No one is paying attention to the ads. And when they click on them, it’s by mistake,” says Kahn, who, it may come as little surprise, leads a middle-market firm entrenched inside the search advertising industry.

“When you go on a search engine looking for a new car, you know what you’re looking for — you’re looking for a new car,” explains Kahn, who argues that users of social networks seldom have shopping in mind.

Of course, such opinions haven’t curtailed Facebook, Twitter, and others from basking in the media’s limelight in recent years. Unable to command such press attention, Internet search appears at times to have been back-benched as just one more downgraded starlet.

Similarly, Kahn is resolute: “Nobody cares about email anymore either, but you can’t live without it.”

He adds: “The search engine is never going to go away. It would be like walking into Mall of America and not using a directory. Search is always going to be part of the Internet. People will always need to find something.”