History of Adapt

The History of Adapt

Florida based Adapt was founded by James Hawkins in 1998 to develop affiliate marketing websites, generating custom content to attract users, help them with the searching/purchasing experience, and thus generate sales for web retailers such as Amazon.com and numerous others in return for a percentage of the sales. At that time this was an emerging field with few substantial players. Soon thereafter, the company began aggressively developing sites, growing to a peak of in excess of 150 sites with millions of pages of content attracting, in the aggregate, tens of thousands of page views per day. These sites were created using a combination of custom designed programs, templates, and macros created by its founder and others, supplemented with functions of publicly available software programs and applications. Each site was as large as millions of internal pages of relatively unique content. No other individual or entity is known to have developed sites of this type on this scale.

In 2000 or so the company began to aggressively use emerging pay per click sites, principally Goto.com, later to be acquired by Yahoo and become Yahoo Search Marketing, and as a model a precursor to the now industry leader Google AdWords. An early adopter of the advertising medium, Adapt at one point was a bidder on hundreds of thousands of frequently obscure search phrases before Goto.com, and for that matter most sites, had developed effective phrase matching systems, and was eventually seemingly the instigator for Goto.com's policy changes with regard to submissions and minimum bids with its (Adapt's) hundreds of thousands of additional search term submissions in Goto.com's queue. As the field evolved, Adapt continued to aggressively practice pay per click arbitrage, bidding on numbers of terms at levels less than could be immediately generated in revenue. Early on in the evolution of PPC advertising, the company would be issued a certificate from Google for having generated in excess of a million leads. The company was a bidder on a large number of phrases for a fraction of the expected revenues per click through until around 2005 when mainstream advertisers began to run up bids to a multiple of expected revenue per click through.

In November of 2003, the world of affiliate marketing began its inevitable decline with Google's update to its algorithm. Dubbed the "Florida Update," one of its effects was to dramatically negatively affect traffic of affiliate marketing sites, beginning a trend that would continue throughout the following year. Given that Adapt, a Florida company, had perhaps the largest presence of its kind at the time, the company has long wondered if the update was named for it.

In late 2005, the company evolved on a couple of fronts. It began re-coding its then core affiliate marketing sites using a proprietary linking format that it thought might reduce what it suspected was negative search engine algorighm effects caused by the presence of affiliate marketing links. It also began developing a set of subject specific blogs, some on the front of existing affiliate marketing sites with the old coding format, others on the front of the new proprietary linking format sites, and yet others as independent blog only sites. Original content articles were sourced via a network of freelance writers it accumulated over a period of months, overlayed with a set of systems, policies, and procedures to detect plagiarism and track writing actities.

By mid 2006, the company had developed over a dozen blogs with around 1,000 relevant original articles each covering topics as diverse as fashion, sports, gardening and caring for babies. However, the company's return on what is considered to be essentially a capital expenditure, that of developing content, never reached its target. Similarly, the company's novel affiliate linking format failed to improve results for its affiliate marketing sites. Given these results, the company ceased developing new content or sites of these types, and shut down a majority its sites.

As an early entrant to all things internet, the company had managed to accumulate a number of high quality domain names. As its needs for these domains declined, it began to offer these at regional domain auctions and on an ongoing basis via Sedo and Moniker, thus backing into the role of a domaineer. Over the years the company has sold a number of premium domains, most notably SyFy.com, a domain the company had previously used to market science fiction books and videos for Amazon.com, which was sold to NBC Universal and used to rebrand their Sci-Fi channel to the SyFy channel. The company still holds over 200 domains including iMattresses.com, TVvideos.com, Sduf.com, and others.

In 2009, Adapt ramped up its e-commerce activities, evolving from an affiliate marketer to a direct marketer. By 2010, the company was selling in excess of 1,000 unique items across a set of websites.

Also in 2009, the company engaged in a number of activities primarily in the interest of developing expertise; developed its SlapSound novelty application for Apple's iPhone, began producing and selling application specific paper forms, published a picture book and two 2010 wall calendars via Lulu, designed a number of print on demand items and related sites to market them. The company has considered and continues to consider endeavors related to these activities, most notably that of manufacturing products where it deems there to be a reasonably good business opportunity, and likely where it believes it can use its retailing channels to support if not fully carry marketing efforts to end customers.