Jellyfish is pleased to announce a partnership with Channel Intelligence today that will help accelerate our efforts to add new retailer partners to the Jellyfish.com shopping search engine.  Full Release here.    

This news is an opportune time for me to talk briefly about the Jellyfish advertising model.  There has been a flood of new shopping search engines over the past several months, but to my knowledge, Jellyfish is the only shopping search provider that is doing the hard work of building its own Cost Per Action advertising platform.  (Please correct me if there are others).  Granted, there are a handful of shopping engines that utilize affiliate providers such as Linkshare to integrate CPA advertising into their mix, but these big affiliate providers have illiquid commission structures (typically a standard store-wide commission rate for any sale).  

Why are we building our own CPA ad platform?  It’s a key part of our long range vision for a more consumer friendly version of CPA advertising that we call Value Per Action, or VPA.  Retailers in the Jellyfish system can adjust their advertising rates on a global store level, product category level or at the individual SKU-level for each product.  This makes perfect sense, as retailers may be willing to pay more or less in CPA ad fees for a sale depending upon the product being sold.  

Probably the best way to consider the advantages of this platform is to compare the Jellyfish model to Google’s remarkably successful Cost Per Click keyword ad platform.  Through competition, Google has created a liquid marketplace of Cost Per Click ad rates on millions of keywords.  Every day, online retailers compete with each other to achieve higher rankings on keyword searches by agreeing to pay Google more for each click, creating higher and higher advertising fees for Google.  Over the past several years, the true market rate for a click on keywords such as ”nikon digital camera,” ”mp3 player” and millions more have been set by this efficient system.   

With the Jellyfish CPA ad platform, online retailers bid not on keywords, but on the actual products they sell that match up in our shopping search engine.  The more stores are willing to pay for a successful sale, the higher they go on our rankings.  But here is where our unique model creates a more consumer friendly version of CPA:  In our VPA model, we always share back at least half of those advertising fees with the end consumer.  Thus, as retailers compete for search ranking by increasing their CPA commissions, BOTH Jellyfish and the end consumer benefit directly from that competition.  It’s a liquid CPA marketplace that creates lower prices for end consumers.  (you can read a full description of VPA here)  

For Jellyfish to see this vision through, we need two things: 1) lots of people buying products through our site; and 2) lots of quality retailers taking advantage of our risk-free CPA model to compete for those sales.  Channel Intelligence is a tremendous partner to help us achieve goal number 2.  CI customers include nearly 200 of the world’s best known retail brands, all of which now have direct access to the Jellyfish platform.  We look forward to helping CI and its clients take full advantage of the accountability and precision of Jellyfish shopping engine.                      

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Announcements, Value Per Action Advertising, Cost Per Action Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.