Lessons in Value Add
Despite what one of our favorite friends in the industry tells us, it is not easy making money arbitraging media. And, with the recent tightening by Facebook, the job of the arbitrager has not gotten any easier. It isn’t as though one particular earthquake has hit making the landscape more difficult, instead, we find ourselves operating in a world overcoming many obstacles. One of them involves traffic sources wanting fewer advertisers of a particular type and looking to restrict any new entrant. We spoke to a company looking to enter a lead generation vertical through ppc, and in conversations with a traffic source, they were told that they would face some serious obstacles to having their ads run even though their property added more value than others already running. It didn’t matter. The traffic source didn’t want to deal with any more people wanting to tap a particular vertical.
The education space in general from Google to end buyers has had to deal with a surplus of those wanting to make money selling leads. As we see with Facebook, more and more people simply choose to say "No more," regardless of the size of the opportunity. If there is one thing about arbitragers, "No" means look for a window instead of the door. And that happened with one aspect of education lead generation. Knowing that they wanted to monetize from education leads but without the ability in many places to purchase direct intent keywords, they looked for other keywords and themes that could lead to education monetization. As is usually the case, someone figured out an angle that was quickly copied. In this case, the angle involved, for lack of a better term, phony job sites. Those running them might argue that Monster is a job site and makes a significant amount of money on education lead generation. They have for years. The difference between Monster and the thin affiliate job sites comes down to the main purpose of the site – jobs or education leads. In the arbitragers case, jobs provided access to keywords and a demographic receptive to education lead generation. They didn’t actually invest in the jobs themselves.
Until recently, access to jobs provided the biggest hurdle. Listings existed on closed sites like Monster which didn’t have any syndication deals for small partners. In the era of openness and syndication, it was only a matter of time before a company created the opposite – job listings as content for almost any site. It wasn’t much longer before savvy marketers figured out how to use that to their advantage. And, it didn’t take that long after before they started playing hide and seek with some traffic sources.
If you haven’t see the ads, here is what you’d find:
Resume
Found: 321 jobs in your area
Make $15 -$100 / hour with bonuses!
A click on the ad (the last site has been taken down) would lead to a landing page that resembles the following.
It’s a pretty straightforward, unbranded job site. The blessing and the curse is that much like a debt site, people are so hungry for jobs they don’t stop to think that maybe the site doesn’t actually have the jobs. Start the search, and you will be taken to something like the following.
For those in the performance marketing space, the interrupt for data is quite common. Free iPod? Next step is always "Where do we ship," i.e., data collection. By filling out the fields, the site can recoup some of the cost via direct mail and call centers even if the person doesn’t do any revenue generating event post submit. And, if you look on the page, you will see something like the following, "As we generate your job listings, you will see a series of advertising offers. These offers are optional. You are not required to participate in the offers in order to receive your listings." On those less upfront and more concerned about revenue, you’ll find statements like, "Completing your FREE resume profile as accurately as possible will allow us to match you with the most relevant positions and employers. You’re just seconds away from your full results!" Naturally.
Our personal favorite is this one:
Is there anything really wrong with this? No. So why the issue? It has nothing to do with anything they did wrong but how they compare to others. If everyone else required a sign-up for results, then it wouldn’t be a problem. Other sites, though, don’t ask you to register to view results. It would almost be like Google asking you to register to view search results. And, by the existence of these, they have created the experience by which others will be compared. Is my personal information really going to yield better results? Of course not, unless the questions asked dealt with experience and other factors that could improve the filtering of results. My cellphone is not one of those criteria. As more than one Privacy Policy states, "We may sell the Personal Information that you supply to us to any third party and we may work with other businesses to bring selected retail opportunities to our users. These businesses and third parties may include, but are not limited to: (a) providers of direct marketing services and applications, including lookup and reference, data enhancement, suppression and validation; (b) e-mail marketers; and (c) telemarketers." Ah. Helping others with jobs. I get it.
Creating a job site and getting volume (on Google) is not nearly as easy as it once was. Luckily for arbitragers, there is still Yahoo / Bing. A quick scan of select keywords shows results littered with identical sites, almost literally the same sites. And, again, we don’t care that much, but we care about what it continues to mean for the performance marketing industry. Lessons learned from other areas, a glut of undifferentiated services means unsubstantiated claims and the downward spiral towards illegal misrepresentation. Marketers themselves won’t invest in the product until all avenues become closed off and they must invest to get any traffic. Similar to flogs it’s a matter of when not if. Since we are talking about Yahoo, it could be a long when.
