Marie Haynes (Marie_Haynes) via Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) posted on Twitter a screen shot of a business that banked on getting links from colleges, that had to shut down that business because these colleges would no longer link to these types of web sites.
Here is the web page describing why they shut down the program:
Here is a text copy:
The scholarship program has been terminated.When we started this program it was done in order to obtain links from colleges and universities to our website. Our business is creating traffic for insurance companies. The more links we have the more traffic we generate the more revenue we generate. For a while this strategy worked. Unfortunately over the last year colleges have grown less and less cooperative in posting scholarship programs and providing those links. Our traffic has dwindled to the point where we had $0 revenue last month.
The rest of the page describes the program that you can win "$2,500 award for each 250 essays submitted."
Another example of a business based on Google's PageRank model that closed down...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
