What's going on with some internet companies is as debased as it is intelligent. With such low barriers to entry, you see all sorts of kooky schemes cropping up on the web and trying to make a quick buck--usually via advertising. Depending on your point of view, the worst or the best are those that outsource all of their value.

8-betterwebsites is one such entity. Their self-effacing premise is utterly straightforward: you search for something, e.g. Media, and they present the following statement...

"We have found that many of our visitors to our web page have wanted more information about Media. We have taken the time to collect the best sites we can find on the internet about Media. We hope you will find this invaluable information as useful as we have."

...which precedes approximately eight web addresses appropriate to Media, with a blurb and link accompanying each. How humbly helpful.

What the casual viewer may not realize is that those names, blurbs, and links are actually the work of Google, 8-betterwebsites' advertising partner. Quite practically, they are paid advertisements, and each time a viewer follows his host's suggestions and clicks on one of those ads, 8-betterwebsites gets paid for the deed.

In a moral sense, this is the lowest form of business. 8-betterwebsites adds nothing new to the equation in terms of novel knowledge, and marketing masquerades as unbiased information. So screw those guys, right?

But in an opprtunistic sense, this is also the most basic form of business. In a realm where companies strive to increase their advertising clicks, these guys have radically adjusted the place of advertising on a webpage. By making the entirety of their page into ostensibly helpful ads (silly prefatory paragraph aside) they turn an intrusive element into something desirable. It's a coup at no cost and (who knows) maybe great profit.

For those out there interested in taking advantage of this internet wave, in terms of pure monetization the model is worth thinking about. As for the efficacy of the site, you might as well just Google what you're looking for yourself.