A Brief History - Adapting Since 1998

Florida based Adapt was founded by James Hawkins in 1998 to exploit developing opportunities on the internet. Today engaged primarily in e-commerce and concept incubation, in its earliest years the company developed and operated affiliate marketing websites, generating custom content to help web users find and purchase merchandise, thus generating sales for web retailer partners including Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Sports Authority, and others, in return for a percentage of the resultant sales. At the time, this was an emerging field with few substantial players. The company systematically developed sites, growing to a peak of over 150 sites and millions of pages of content. These sites, today largely a thing of the past for the company and the web in general, in the aggregate garnered tens of thousands of page views per day. 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 entity is known to have developed sites of this type on this scale.

In 2000 or so the company began to extensively utilize then emerging PPC (pay per click) advertising, principally on 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 this advertising medium, Adapt at one point was a bidder on hundreds of thousands of frequently obscure search phrases before wide adoption of effective phrase matching systems, and was seemingly the instigator of Goto.com's policy changes with regard to submissions and minimum bids with its (Adapt's) hundreds of thousands of search term submissions in Goto.com's queue. Early on in the development of Google's PPC advertising, commonly known today as Adwords, Adapt would be recognized by Google for having purchased in excess of a million leads, making it one of the more active PPC advertisers at the time. As the field evolved, Adapt continued to practice pay per click arbitrage, bidding on numbers of terms at levels less than could be generated in revenue from the resultant traffic. These arbitrage activities were abandoned in 2005 as mainstream advertisers began to run up bids to levels that made the practice unprofitable.

In November of 2003, the world of affiliate marketing began its inevitable decline with Google's update to its algorithm. Dubbed the "Florida Update," its greatest significance was that it negatively affected 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 suspected that the update was named for it.

Late 2005 began a time of experimentation for the company as it evolved on a couple of fronts. It began re-coding its then core affiliate marketing sites using a proprietary linking format in an attempt to reduce what it suspected was negative search engine algorithm effects caused by the presence of affiliate marketing links on its sites. It also began developing a set of subject specific blogs, some on the front of existing affiliate marketing sites, and others as independent (blog only) sites. Original content articles were sourced via a network of freelance writers it accumulated over a period of months, overlaid with a set of systems, policies, and procedures to detect plagiarism and track writing activities. By the middle of 2006, the company had developed over a dozen blogs with around a thousand relevant original articles each covering topics as diverse as fashion, sports, and gardening.

A somewhat early entrant to all things internet, the company managed to accumulate a number of high quality domain names before most people were aware of them. 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, perhaps most notably SyFy.com, which was sold to NBC Universal and used to rebrand their Sci-Fi channel to the SyFy channel. The company still holds approximately 100 premium domains including iMattresses.com, TVvideos.com, Sduf.com, DemoVids.com, iFoodGifts.com, and others.

In 2009, the company experimented with a number of activities primarily in the interest of gaining experience; developed a novelty application for Apple's iPhone, began producing and selling application specific paper forms, published a picture book and two 2010 wall calendars via a print-on-demand service, designed a number of print on demand items and related sites to market them, began light manufacturing/assembly and sourcing/branding operations for select products. The company continues to consider endeavors along these lines, most notably that of sourcing products where it deems there to be a business opportunity, particularly where its retailing channels might be utilized to support if not fully carry out related marketing efforts.

In 2010 Adapt ramped up what is today its primary business, e-commerce, as it evolved from its origins as an affiliate marketer and then niche blogger to primarily a direct retailer. Today the company offers thousands of items across a set of websites, as well as via Amazon.com as one of its Gold Sellers.

Also in 2010 the company began acting more as a concept incubator, with varying levels of conceptualization and development work performed on ideas at most distantly related to e-commerce.