Star #10, young funded startups. You're among the best positioned sites anywhere to exploit the heck out of that inefficiency.

Definitely. Just remember, if this is your strategy, choose some niche with little SEO competition (payday loans and the like should clearly be out). Also, optimize for that long tailed traffic! I have a feeling an incredible number of searches are so unique they've never even been seen before, and the majority of the rest are still long tailed. And I'll bet that will only trend up as people learn to properly search for information.

Wouldn't established sites be in a better position due to domain longevity and links? Perhaps older sites have difficulty changing, but would think their positioning is better.

#11 Google recognized that some information is temporal - beyond blogs and social networks - and added search tools to specify the time. Personally, I've found this to be the biggest single improvement in search in years.

#11 SEO is it's own worst enemy and this bullshit industry will hopefully be gone in 2015 (disclaimer: i'm one of the most sccessful SEOs in the european market)

#10 I am not so sure about. 15% is PPC. 85% Organic Click Traffic. Sure there is room and growth, but I think the numbers are misleading.

I think what isn't said is:

Not all traffic is created equal. What do you think the ratio of commercial vs non-commercial searches is?

PPC spend isn't only on searches. It's on AdSense and domain parking. Those account for ~33% of Google's PPC.

PPC gives immediate and quantifiable results. SEO is somewhat blackbox and the results aren't guaranteed or instant.