PPC Vs. Affiliate Arbitrage - Parts 1 & 2
PPC vs. Affiliate Arbitrage - Part 1
by Editor, DM Confidential
Earlier this week, the ever acquisitive ValueClick announced that it added a new company to its interactive marketing mix. We hadn’t read the release when asked what we thought Valueclick paid for the 4th ranked comparison shopping site MeziMedia, operators of Smarter.com. If you still don’t know the price, stop now and visit Mezimedia.com. What do you think the company made in 2006? We guessed 25 million. Turns out the company earned $40 million last year and that Valueclick has agreed to pay $100 million. And, that’s just the starting point. If MeziMedia hits its number, they stand to push the total price past $350 million. Look at their growth here, especially compared to leader Shopping.com, and the price starts to make sense.
Valueclick companies, though, always seem to have a layer of revenue that hides beneath the surface. Webclients has their enormous incentive promotion business. MeziMedia has PPC Arbitrage. A company that, at one point, earned 90% of its revenues, not from comparison shopping but, from buying traffic on non-Yahoo search engines and sending their traffic to other search listings. Valueclick always seems to pay a fair price and pick companies that know how to make more money under their wing. As a result, I expect the same to hold true for MeziMedia. It does, though, make for a good time to examine the PPC arbitrage landscape. Normally, this means focusing on those doing CPA arbitrage, such as our recent research on Blockbuster. Today, we look at two different types of arbitrage - buying search to send to other search listings and buying search to drive affiliate commissions. We begin with those who spend on clicks to drive traffic to higher paying click traffic.
A. Domainers - this first group has in their own way always done arbitrage and earned revenue off click traffic. The rise of search has not only enabled them to earn more money on their type-in domain traffic (and as a result increase the sale price), it has also become a means for the more savvy to drive traffic to their names. Some might buy traffic to try and make the domain look more valuable than it is, but many domainers just like opportunities to make more money. They already have the mindset of risk, so search simply represents an extension of that. The two examples here come from affiliates using the parked pages as a means to have an optimized and keyword relevant page.
Editor
DM Confidential
www.dmconfidential.com
e: confi@digitalmoses.com
Reader Comments.
No comments yet
Leave a Comment
Pages: 1 2 next page »
Article Sponsor
More Features
-
Loading ...
Spotlight
Trust Me – I’m a Professional … SEOADOTAS — At WebMetro we typically provide SEO Action Plans as part of campaigns. As the name implies, an SEO [...] more...
Features
- Automakers Need to Become Better Conversationalists July 2nd 2009
- Affiliates can win in the media buy game July 2nd 2009
- Crowd-Sourced Ads: A Measured Response June 28th 2009
- Is the government coming for you? June 28th 2009
- Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It June 25th 2009
Latest News
- Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that [...] more »
- Hiring, promotions, location, partnerships and product news July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital [...] more »
- OPA large ad units unfurl across the web July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The Online Publishers Association said a group of [...] more »
- Email spam in June worst since 2007 July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — MessageLabs Intelligence released its numbers for June, and [...] more »
- Joost becomes YouTube roadkill, starts layoffs July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — Despite reworking its technology to work in a [...] more »
- Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw [...] more »
- StrongMail doubling down on social media, buys PopularMedia July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — StrongMail has announced that it acquired PopularMedia, a [...] more »
Reader Favorites
Layoff Tracker
- AOL - 700
- Apple - 50
- Clear Channel - 2,800 total (1,000 currently)
- Google - 340
- IBM - more than 7,800
- Joost - about 90
- MySpace - in June, about 720
- World Avenue - 30 percent of workforce
- Yahoo - 2,220 total, about 700 currently
- Zango - closes, about 90, in addition to earlier layoffs
Classifieds
Recent Comments
- Josette Davids: Great article and an amazing time was had by all at this event. I'm an
- Mike Poserina: There is also a tragic flaw rumored in Bing's ad placement engine. When resolved,
- Andy: Erin, Never mind the commenters who can only see the negative side of things. I thank you
- pkohler: We've also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As
