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).  

Joe Marchese had a great post yesterday regarding the “build it and they will come” ad revenue strategy of most Web 2.0 start ups (e.g., build traffic and the advertisers will come).  I totally agree with Joe that if advertising is going to be your primary revenue stream, it should not be an afterthought; it should be a central part of your strategy.  

We’ve taken this lesson to heart at Jellyfish.  Our Smack Shopping Show was created to make advertising an integrated part of the show content rather than an interruption.  In fact, Smack Shopping is one big advertisment, but end users view it as entertainment.   I attended the recent OMMA show Joe mentions in his post and much of the discussion was centered on this theme.  We think this kind of engaging advertising will be a big part of the future of advertising on the web. 

The challenge for companies like ours is scale.  It is the classic chicken and egg challenge that many Web 2.0 start ups face in trying to convince major advertisers that experimenting with new advertising formats and smaller, more engaged audiences is the future.  It hasn’t been easy, but Jellyfish is finding initial success with several advertisers.  We’ll be working hard in the upcoming months to show that starting with a sound advertising revenue model is a great recipe for success.   

A quick thanks to Thomas Claburn and Mitch Wagner over at InformationWeek for their coverage of Jellyfish and our Smack Shopping Show this week here and here.

I met with Tom in San Francisco last week and it was great to see his summary of our conversation about Smack Shopping.  One minor point of correction on the article, however, is that Brian is the CEO of Jellyfish; I’m the President.  No worries though Tom, I appreciate the promotion!  

Mitch wondered about our barriers to entry with Smack Shopping in his post.  I’m not aware of many start ups that have a business model that can’t be copied by the big boys (it all comes down to continuous cycles of innovation and excecution), but I did point out to Mitch that we’ve been pretty active with our patent filings at Jellyfish and are working hard to secure some patent rights to the Smack concept.       

Piper Jaffray just released an extensive new report entitled “The User Revolution” that describes how the Internet is empowering consumers and dramatically changing consumer content consumption patterns (MediaPost summary of the report here). 

“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “We believe this will cause a significant rise in the prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.”

In the report, Rashtchy goes on to coin a term for this new type of online content called “Communitainment,” defined as the blending of community, communication and entertainment into a new form of online activity driven by consumers.  The report predicts that consumers will shift more than 50% of their content consumption over the next decade to niche Communitainment formats (e.g., social networking, video and photo sharing sites), displacing traditional forms of media content like TV, magazines and large Internet sites.  This revolution will create a major challenge for advertisers and agencies that need to figure out new ways to incorporate their brands and messages into this new medium. 

As I read the highlights from this report, I couldn’t help thinking about how our Smack Shopping Show is a wonderful example of Communitainment (blog post on Smack here).  Smack Shows combine an entertaining live shopping event with an online community that creates a new form of original online content.  The content is highly engaging, with consumers tuning into Smack Shows for an hour or more each day.  Even more interesting, advertising is the centerpiece of each Smack Shopping program.  Leveraging the unique Jellyfish Cash Back auction, we use advertising dollars to actually create the shopping deals and entertainment that consumers tune in to experience.  By integrating advertising, entertainment and community, Jellyfish is helping drive this “user revolution” in media consumption and helping advertisers reach consumers in new highly efficient ways.  We think Smack Shopping is one great way that advertisers can meet the challenge laid out by Piper Jaffray in their report to stay relevant in the age of Communitainment.   

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. 

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.