The yep search engine is a powerful tool designed by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, and it’s used by some of the world’s top marketers. Yep is a creator-friendly search engine that was created by the Ahrefs team, which has invested close to $60 million towards Yep. Yep’s profit model is to share 90% of advertising revenue with content creators.
Why did Ahrefs Launch Yep?
Yep has been designed specifically for webmasters and online marketers. It incorporates a number of features that make it more accurate and comprehensive than other search engines.
Yep’s about page explains the idea of Yep and why it was built:
“We built Yep from the ground up so that we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators. We’ve all gotten used to a search model that’s arguably unfair. A model where paywalls and affiliate links have insidiously become part of the search experience.
Yep is our answer to this.
Our mission is to go back to the basics: supporting good content.
We offer an unbiased, private search experience that rewards and compensates the makers behind the content. To do this, we use a 90/10 profit share business model where we pay 90% of advertising profits directly to these makers.
Simply put, when you use Yep, you’re directly putting money in the pockets of your favorite content creators.”
Ahrefs is positioning Yep as a Google competitor.
Over the past two decades, we’ve had lots of Google rivals and “killers” come and go. Why does Yep think it will be any different? To establish itself as a genuine Google alternative, there are two things that Yep does differently from Google:
90/10 Profit-Sharing
Ahrefs’ search engine is giving 90% of its advertising revenue to content creators.
The reason being that since Google places content in search results without requiring users to click through, many websites are losing visitors. That means webpages are losing traffic, which has a negative impact on their revenue.
Gerasymenko said:
“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work,” “We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry.”
Yep also says:
“Let’s say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers.
Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They’d be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary.
There would be no more need for paywalls and affiliate links, so publishers who’ve had to resort to chasing traffic with clickbait articles and filling their pages with ads would be able to get back to doing investigative pieces and quality analysis. A citizen journalist uncovering corruption on the side of a full-time job could get compensated without having to spend time trying to monetize content.
And the best thing? You don’t have to be an expert to benefit.
Let’s say that you love pancakes more than anything else in the world. Now you have an incentive to grow that passion – imagine getting fairly paid to share creative recipes, publish photos of your creations and teach the rest of the world how they, too, can make the fluffiest pancakes ever. Independent creators everywhere will finally be able to flourish.”
It might all sound rather idealistic, but that’s what makes Yep exciting in the first place. It strives towards a search experience more pure and hopeful than the fake news and chaos we often find ourselves in today.
In theory, it all sounds wonderful. But Yep has just launched.
Launched in 2008, popular search engine DuckDuckGo sees around 15.7 billion searches each year which is as much as Google does in about two or three days. Even Bing, which Microsoft owns since 2009, has failed to dent Google’s search market share.
Privacy
By default, Yep will not save personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender). Your search history on Yep will not be saved anywhere.
Yep will obtain aggregated search data to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions.
“In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way,” said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko. “For example, we will track how many times a word is searched for and the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won’t create your profile for targeted advertising.”
Yep will use the following information:
- The user’s entered keywords
- The user’s language preference
- The user’s approximate geographical area where the search was conducted (region or a city) (deduced from user’s IP address).
Was it worth investing $60M?
$60M is a lot of money to invest into a search engine. Where did Ahrefs even get such a large sum of investment? The company claims that it re-invested its subscription revenue. The firm says it has over $100 million in yearly profits from over 50,000 customers and has thus far rejected external investment. There are 90 people at the firm’s headquarters in Singapore and a team of 11 is working on Yep. Gerasymenko himself is heavily engaged in the search engine project, according to the company.