Tactic 16. The Honey Approach – Be Sweet
Named for the adage, “You can get more bees with honey than with vinegar,” Yahoo! and Microsoft both adopted the Honey Approach by promoting the desirability of their content as a key reason to peer with them.
As one of the largest portals in the world, Yahoo! described the thousands of live webcast events, the hundreds of thousands of concurrent streams of content delivered, the gigabits-per-second of raw traffic flows, etc. as reasons why an ISP should want to receive that traffic over a peering relationship instead of through its transit relationship. Microsoft promotes its portals and the massive volume of traffic that can be delivered for free over peering sessions that would otherwise be delivered through transit providers at a substantial cost. Microsoft would deliver the content in-country for free or via expensive transit services from somewhere overseas. Since many ISPs see their network performance as a key differentiator, Yahoo! leverages this performance lure well (Figure 11-31).
Figure 11-31. Sell peering with you.
This tactic is also demonstrated when Yahoo! and others stand up during “peering personals” and discuss why people should want to peer with them. Peering personals is a mainstay of the peering forums where peering coordinators stand up and introduce themselves and their company to the room. After this self-introduction the peers can put a face to a name and have their peering discussions.
Peering personals is a place to execute the Honey Approach tactic. You want to stand up and participate because it is far easier to have others approach you than to have to seek out others to start the peering discussions.