"At Jellyfish.com, we want to change your relationship with advertising; making it something that always works directly for your benefit instead of wasting money interrupting and annoying you.
Why Current Advertising Stinks
To most people advertising is a dirty word. Look at the traditional world. We have been bombarded and interrupted by unwanted advertisements from the time we could walk and most of us have developed a healthy animosity towards ads. In fact, we hate them so much we actually spend money to avoid them; buying things like Tivo DVR’s and Satellite Radio. Yet, advertisements fly around our heads like pesky insects on everything from city buses to products placed in our favorite movies. Occasionally, we find one entertaining or relevant, but mostly we simply endure them as a necessary evil.
When you ask most people to describe advertising you will likely hear things like “annoying,” “interruptive,” “biased,” and “wasteful.” Does it have to be this way? We don’t think so.
The State of Online Advertising
The next question becomes, “has the Internet made advertising better for consumers?” It has certainly made advertising more of a scientific certainty for advertisers. Instead of placing an ad in a magazine or on television and hoping that people actually pay attention to the message, online advertising allows companies to pay only when you actually view a page with an online ad it, or click on a link to an advertiser’s web site. For the first time in history, it is now possible to accurately measure and track how people are actually interacting with each individual advertising unit on a global scale and in almost real time. Huge amounts of money are now pouring online because advertising can deliver laser beam certainty.
But has this amazing shift also changed how people feel about advertising? Not really, in our opinion. We avoid banners, and hate things like pop-ups and interstitials that continue to interrupt us. We have to sit through a full page ad on our screen before we can enjoy the New York Times, CBS Sportsline, or a host of other sites. And we try to avoid these ads as much as we can. Online advertising is still a necessary evil.
This is true even of the paid search advertising at search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. These sponsored links are certainly more targeted and can be helpful, but most people we know still try to avoid these ads. They are happy that the sponsored results are pushed off to the margins of the screen and conspicuously labeled “Sponsored” to keep them away from pure organic search results. Why is this? We think it is because the existing “Pay Per Click” search advertising model—in which advertisers pay each time someone clicks on a search link—fails to align incentives properly between the consumer, the advertiser and the search engine intermediary connecting them. This existing model is mostly there to benefit the search engine.
Search Engines Auction you off to the Highest Bidder
Most people don’t know this, but there is a huge advertising auction that takes place every day at the major search engines. And what are they auctioning? The auction is for your attention. Companies bid for your attention by paying to be listed in the sponsored search results when you type in certain terms. And the more they agree to pay the search engine for each click, the better chance they have of getting listed higher up in the search rankings. Every engine is a bit different, but the paid results are organized with one primary goal in mind; to maximize the amount of advertising revenue the search engines make. Thus, the more an advertiser pays the search engine for your click, the more likely that advertiser will be listed high in the rankings and get your attention. That is why the advertising is called Pay Per Click (PPC).
This auction system works really well for the search engines because is allows market forces to drive up what an advertiser is willing to pay for your attention. And these rates go up all of the time. If I sell coffee makers, I want you to see my ad first when you search on the term “coffee maker,” and I don’t want my competitor to get to you first, so I’m willing to bid higher and higher click rates to be listed high up in the rankings for that search. And the more the search engine knows about you (where you live, what sites you visit, etc.), the more targeted you are as a sales lead and the more they can charge advertisers in this auction system to reach you. But here is where the mistrust of advertising comes in; the sites that are listed first in the sponsored results for my search aren’t necessarily offering the best coffee maker for you; they are the sites that make the search engine the most money. And the consumer has no idea what the advertising amount is. It reminds us of a commissioned sales person that shows you a product at a store that gives them the best commission. Do you trust them? Probably not. Isn’t this why the search engines have to label these results as advertisements?
A Major Shift in Online Search Advertising: From Pay Per Click to Value Per Action
The Pay Per Click auction has been great for search engines, but the problem is that most of the value created by this auction is flowing to the search engine in the form of advertising fees that primarily benefit the engine at the expense of buyers and sellers. Don’t get us wrong; we aren’t saying you shouldn’t use search engines (we think they are fantastic tools for finding information). Our mission is to show you that when you are buying stuff online, there is a way that we can bring you directly into the value created by this advertising auction for your attention.
At Jellyfish, we want to pioneer a new form of search advertising we call Value Per Action. Instead of charging fees when you click, we charge our advertisers only when you actually buy, and we share at least half of this fee back to you as cash back. In other words, we connect you directly to the value of the advertising. Instead of measuring how much money WE make when you click, we measure how much value the advertiser is willing to pay YOU for your sale. With VPA, the advertising value of your attention becomes transparent (you can see it in the form of cash back) and changes from annoying advertising into something that actually lowers your end price.
And to help you get the maximum amount of savings when you buy, we are using the same kind of advertising auction that the major search engines do. But instead of ranking our results by the amount companies pay us in the form of hidden advertising fees, we rank results by the end price for a product, after our cash back. We think this will create a perfect retail marketplace because retailers will increase their VPA advertising rates to get to the top of our rankings and the value of that advertising competition will flow directly to you to lower your price (you can see a picture of this system here). The more stores compete for your attention, the more you save. And you don’t have to do anything more than search for things you want to buy.
Consumers Take Control of Advertising
We think Value Per Action is a big idea. It is a way that advertising can adapt and survive in a new world where consumers have ultimate control to tune out interruptive, biased advertising. We think you will see many companies that begin to use forms of VPA to make advertising something that you control, receive independent value from, trust, and most importantly, invite into your lives. Our hope is that Jellyfish.com will lead this charge, and help people turn the tables on traditional advertising. Do you want to help us? Then please start shopping at Jellyfish.com. Our service is free and who can’t use more money in their account?"
http://www.jellyfish.com/ourVision
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