Hey John and Ross... Isn't this sell side advertising?
Gary Stein has a revalation:
I suddenly realized that their affiliates do a ton of search marketing, and eBay is naturally funding this through the commisions they reward. So, while it may be true that eBay is only spending 5% of revenue directly on SEM, they are clearly putting a lot of dollars into the system indirectly through the affliate channel.
Isn't that sell side advertising by accident?
I found some other interesting sell-"ish" side models while browsing yesterday. I started here at Auren Hoffman's blog (SideNote: Auren, Mr. Connector, had a nice write up in Fortune Small Business recently. He gets paid by CEO's to simply connect them to potential high profile partners and customers.) where he wants some feedback on a new startup called KarmaOne, where individuals are paid a bounty if they connect a company with an employee that they are looking for.
(Sidenote, if anyone wants to launch a site like KarmaOne, I have all of the technology built, just not the time. Take a look at this and this and then think of how easy it'd be to turn a website like those examples into a website that advertises a job and lets people tell their friends about it so that the can collect the rewards/bounty.)
One of the jobs that Auren highlights is this one, which is a job for a company called Adteractive, which is billing itself as a CPA (Cost per Action) Advertising network. If any of the networks have the possibility of transitioning to a Sell-Side Model where advertisers simply set their CPA price and the publishers get to optimize the creative and the campaign, it'd be CPA networks. Unfortunately, Adteractive isn't doing that now. But, it could.
Once again, if someone wants to build a Sell Side CPA contest where publishers and people get to design the creative to promote a product, I have all of the technology built to track time based campaigns. And access to a network that can sufficiently market the campaign. Hmmm. Maybe we'll do a CPA Sell Side campaign for WhizSpark using our own tools.
Following all of this CPA talk, anyone that is interested in affiliate/CPA or even the Sell-Side model should take a look at this post by Greg Yardley where he painstakingly goes through the problems inherent in CPA deals.
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