I’m pleased to announce that we’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft announcement here. Brian and I view the acquisition as a great way to expand the vision of Jellyfish and we are thrilled to join the Microsoft team.
What? You’ve never seen a Jellyfish roundup? Here goes . . .
It’s been a busy couple of weeks of news for Jellyfish and I’d like to quickly summarize some of the key highlights.
Smack Shopping Goes 24 by 7
Smack Shopping is now open for business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (full release here and show schedule here). 7-Eleven better watch out! Anytime you come to Jellyfish.com, there is now a live Smack Shopping show with our unique price dropping auction taking place. We’ve also added a host of great social shopping features, including personal shopping pages (you can see mine here). Early results are extremely positive, with our daily uniques up almost two fold and fantastic feedback from our community. I’m just worried we may have to start a Smack-a-holics support group soon.
Investor Business Daily Coverage
Thanks to Patrick Cain for a great article covering Jellyfish and Smack Shopping his past Friday. As analyst Peter Kim mentioned in the article, programs like Smack Shopping need to be tied into solid content and a strong user experience, and we’ve worked hard to ensure that is the case. I’m continually impressed with the loyalty and retention of our Smack Shoppers. Becky Ford over at CompareRewards.com discusses our Smack loyalty here.
ChannelAdvisor Partnership
We announced on Monday a fantastic partnership with ChannelAdvisor (full release here). ChannelAdvisor is a fantastic company (Scot Wingo’s CSE blog is one of my favorites to keep up to date on the Comparison Shopping space), and the partnership will help us continue to bring tier 1 retailers into the Jellyfish Value Per Action advertising platform. Scot was one of the first people we discussed the Jellyfish.com model with pre-launch, and its great to be partnering with ChannelAdvisor.
Jellyfish just announced a unique customer acquisition program: Co-hosted Smack Shopping events. Full Release Here. The release features our show with Slashdot taking place at 2pm Central today, which you can check out here.
How do co-hosted events work? It’s pretty simple really. We partner with web sites that are looking to create a fun and valuable event to engage and reward their own user base. We set a Smack show date and time, our partner promotes the event, and we run the show, absorbing the production costs. Our partner gets to reward its users with a unique online event that helps keep its brand top of mind at virtually no cost. And we get our brand and value proposition out to a whole host of new users by serving up a rewarding experience rather than annoying and interrupting them with unwanted advertisements. It is kind of like the traveling circus, Internet style.
Jellyfish has already had successful Smack shows with a host of great online properties, from Ars Technica to The Consumerist to The Chicago Tribune. Look for lots more co-hosted shows in the upcoming weeks. And if you’re interested in learning more about how we can bring the Smack circus to your town, please e-mail Aaron Everson, our Director of Business Development (ate@jellyfish.com).
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.
Since our launch in June of 2006, Jellyfish has been working hard to drive adoption of a new form of online advertising we call Value Per Action that eliminates the waste from traditional advertising and transforms it into added customer savings (you can read about VPA here and our vision of advertising here).
With Jellyfish taking the high road against traditional forms of biased, interruptive advertising, many questioned how we were going to attract customers and generate awareness for our brand and our shopping search engine. Not a bad question and one we asked ourselves many times. Television ads, billboards, and even Google keywords were out of the question. But what was left?
The answer for Jellyfish has been something we call Smack Shopping. The Internet’s first live shopping game show, Smack Shopping combines the fun of a game show with the fantastic deals generated by the Jellyfish cash back auction. Smack shows run every business day at 12 CST and include multiple Smack Auctions where a limited quantity of products are offered for sale at increasing cash discounts. Participants have the chance to buy the hottest online products at remarkable discounts, play games for prizes and interact with a virtual community of other Smack shoppers (a Smack by definition is a group of Jellyfish).
To our knowledge, Smack Shopping is the first game show broadcast live to an online audience that actively participates in the event. There are other companies working on streaming video plus chat, see for example Pete Cashmore’s discussion of Lycos Cinema here and the much anticipated launch of Joost here, but Smack Shopping does more than view pre-assembled video.
Fueled by Jellyfish cash back, the game and the entertainment is actually advertising, but I doubt any of our users would view it as such. It’s a customer acquisition strategy that is consistent with the Jellyfish promise. Instead of spending money interrupting people with traditional advertising, Jellyfish is using advertising dollars to create compelling game show like content that consumers seek out and invite into their lives. And it is working. From the beta launch of Smack Shopping on November 1 until today, Jellyfish has grown its user base over 5X, with Smack Shows regularly engaging 10’s of thousands of online shoppers for an hour or more of fun every day.
Advertising as content. It is a trend we are going to see more of as consumers gain more control over where they devote their attention and advertising seeks out new ways to be relevant. We view Smack Shopping as permission-based, engaging advertising at its best.
Today is Black Friday, the busiest holiday shopping day of the year. In honor, we kicked off Smack Friday this morning at 6am (EST). The Smack Friday promotion includes around the clock Smack Shopping Deals (a new deal every two hours). The deals and action have been great thus far. I hope you stop by to check it out.
As an added Smack Friday bonus, we also have two contests going (here and here) to win a new Sony PS3. Don’t miss it!
We launched a new program today called the Smack Shopping Deal of the Day. Here’s how it works: Every weekday at 1pm EST, we will announce a new product offer on the site and kick off a cash back counter that increases the cash back savings every second until the product is sold out.
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Things were a bit hectic today and we had our share of first day bugs (the time zone problem has been fixed!), but overall the launch was a phenomenal success. We ended up selling a bunch of iPods to folks with big cash back discounts. You can see the results of the first day’s Smack deal here. Starting tomorrow, we will also start to include more specifics on the Smack deal (including the total number sold and the top ten best cash back deals) after it closes for the day.
The Deal of the Day is the first feature we are launching under the Smack Shopping brand name. A “Smack” is a group of Jellyfish (like a flock of geese) and Smack Shopping at Jellyfish will help our shoppers find strength in numbers. We also think it is a great way to communicate the powerful, dynamic nature of the Jellyfish cash back discount. You can expect more Smack Shopping features from us in the upcoming weeks, so please stay tuned.
I hope you check back tomorrow at 1pm EST for the next Smack deal.
This past Friday, Jellyfish announced a $5 million private equity round of financing and the addition of retail industry veteran Ralph Dillon to our Board of Directors.
The funding will allow us to move forward aggressively with our vision of online advertising, and the belief that the customer should be a direct participant in the advertising value equation. We may not execute perfectly over the next few years, but you can rest assured that all of us at Jellyfish will be working extremely hard on our campaign to drive great accountability and value from online advertising.
We’ve been relatively quiet since our beta launch in late June, but we’ve been working on more than just this funding. We have several major announcements planned for the upcoming weeks, all of which all oriented around building the concept of Value Per Action advertising and empowering the end consumer. In fact, you may want to check the site around lunch time this week for a fun announcement and the addition of a new brand name here at Jellyfish. You’ll be disappointed if you miss it. Trust me.
I’m happy to announce a new deal blog at Jellyfish we call the Dealness. It’s a place where you can get a steady dose of great online deals and learn more about the deal finding ecosystem.
Run by our resident deal expert, Aaron Everson, the Dealness should help you discover new products, find great prices, and learn how to be a smart online shopper. I hope you check it out soon.
There are a lot of job-seekers out there vying for my attention. Why then do they seem to put so little time into the process? We’re a vibrant Internet company caught up in the excitement of executing on some really big ideas. The last thing I want to do is read a bland resume that feels like it’s been sent out to dozens of non-descript companies. If you’re sending me a resume, you’re interrupting me, and I’ve had many years of practice at ignoring disruptive advertising. (Thanks flashblock! Thanks TiVo!) As a job seeker, the last thing you want to do is get dismissed in the first few seconds.
If you send me a resume, here are a few things you can do to compensate me for my time:
If job seekers took the interruptive nature of their requests to heart and spent time individually talking to me, reviewing resumes would be a lot more rewarding. I can dream…