I just got off the phone with the folks from Compete.com and found the call to be fairly interesting though they still have a few things to work out with their featureset. Compete is what I call a version 2 of meta search. Others nowadays dump meta search engines into the mashups category but I like to refine my taxonomy a bit more than that. So Compete takes it's search results directly from Yahoo (from a partnership of sorts, details of which have not been disclosed) and overlay 3 pieces of data regarding the search results so you can know a bit more about the site before you actualy go there. The three pieces of data are as follows...
1.) Trust Trustworthiness of site


2.) Rank Popularity of site (main domain, not url specific).


3.) Deals Are there any known deals for the site (syndicating deals from Coupon Mountain).



There are some cool UI features like the ability (dubbed Snapshot) to compare competing sites against each other to see how they do in terms of unique visitors, rank, pages per visit and average stay of visitors. However, I must say that I believe this data is skewed but not sure in which directions. Think Alexa but instead of being skewed for technology it appears to be just the opposite. I also appears that smaller sites (less than 1 million page views a month) are grossly inaccurate but perhaps it's because they don't include bot stats in their calculations, not sure).

Any way you cut it, the success of compete is in their ability to get users to click on coupons and Yahoo's sponsored links at the top of search results. In order to do that they have to get a large amount of people to change the way they search and/or download their toolbar and I'm not sure I see either of those happening for some time.

The deals button makes sense but I don't like the fact that the deals only come from CouponMountain. I know there are other trustworthy coupon sites out there that have direct deals with merchants and deals should've been struck there before Compete launched. They did say that they plan on moving towards the user submitted coupons route but I can only imagine the nightmare that will ensue when that happens. I say stick with 10 trustworthy coupon vendors and that's it and make sure you RSS-ify the site snapshots so people can start integrating the data in free tools and build the word of mouth buzz that way. Working on user generated coupons is worse than building a new search engine entirely.

Add Sheryl Crow to the list of celebs who feel compelled to launch a line of products bearing their names.

Crow put out a press release basically telling the world that her name is for sale. And I quote:

Nine-time Grammy winner Sheryl Crow has engaged LA based Brand Sense Partners to help her identify and execute new business ventures that are complementary to her artistry, lifestyle and commitment to social responsibility.

.

Why is it that the rich and soon-to-be-less-famous feel the need to brand themselves and start hawking perfume, clothes, and god knows what else? Does Sheryl realize that her Crow's feet (I couldn't resist) are the beginning of the end for her music career?

Endorsement deals are one thing, but creating an entire line of products is the height of self-absorption. (Ask Galileo -- the sun doesn't revolve around you!).

They are obviously doing it for the money, even when they don't need it. The target audience is easy. Like lemmings, the soap opera moms will buy anything with Oprah or Cher on the label, so I guess you can't blame them.

Brand Sense Partners also represents Britney Spears and Kim Basinger, so they are no stranger to blonde ambitions.

I'm holding out for K-Fed, the toothpaste. Your teeth are so blindingly bright that women can't see that you have no talent.

Just as I expected, user-generated video sites are now offering compensation to contributors whose videos generate lots of traffic.

According to Wired News' Michael Calore, Metacafe launched
a section of its website for premium videos called Producer Rewards where people get paid once their videos reach a plateau of traffic. This is exactly the right model to attract the best content and win contributors away from YouTube and the other sites.

Break.com and Revver also provide incentives to contributors, so Google needs to come up with its own payment plan or else lose many of the non-infringing contributors who provide their content. This is capitalism at its best -- a direct connection between producers and consumers, with all parties sharing the rewards.