Music
Good afternoon.
How's everyone doing?
So we have been hired to be the layup for the ending keynote of Affiliate Summit
last 2010.
And the panel that Sean and Missy put together here is truly outstanding.
This is a really unique panel for Affiliate Summit.
I've been doing Affiliate Summit now for about five years.
But this is the first panel that I think bridges two important things that,
whether or not you're interested in raising capital for your business,
or whether or not you're interested in eventually selling your business,
each of the panelists here have raised considerable amounts of money,
one of the panelists, almost $18 million for his startup,
the others in the millions.
But these are also individuals that have subject matter expertise within the Affiliate space.
So this panel is on new developments in automated monetization.
It's a bit sophisticated, if you will.
And each of the panelists will share more about what it is that they do.
But as you guys know, there's a ton of innovation going on right now in the Affiliate space.
You know, from the beginning of the Affiliate marketing industry in the late 90s,
what was, and has still been called the traditional Affiliate Marketing Space,
has now turned into something that's much different,
where Silicon Valley has now involved making investments.
Company I found it, way back in those early days,
a company called Pepper Jam was acquired in 2009 by a publicly traded company.
So there's a lot of action going on.
And so I'm hoping that today's panelists will give you a perspective from the inside of that action.
But we're going to talk about their core technologies,
and we're also going to talk about the broader conversation of traffic monetization
using affiliate techniques as well as others.
As I mentioned, my former company Pepper Jam I found in 1999.
I sold it in 2009 to GSI Commerce.
I've been in this space as well as the interactive marketing space for several years.
Pepper Jam was an interactive marketing company and an affiliate network called Pepper Jam Network.
I've been speaking at shows. I'm an author.
I wrote two books on search engine optimization called SEO Visual Blueprint by Wiley Publishing.
And I'm really active in the community because I really care about its future.
And I've been afforded many great opportunities as both a thought shaper
as well as an entrepreneur in this space.
And I'm hoping that each of you, in many of you are already there, crushing it.
But my hope is that many of you could learn from my experience as well as the panelists
to indeed crush it as well.
So let's start with introductions.
The structure of today's panel will be moderated Q&A for half of the time.
And then the second half will be questions from you.
So get your questions ready.
But without further ado, I'd like to introduce Paul Edmondson.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Hubpages, which has raised about $8 million.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Paul?
Hi.
Yeah, I'm Paul Edmondson.
About five years ago, two of my colleagues at Microsoft and I,
we left Microsoft to start Hubpages.com.
The idea was a pretty simple idea.
What we wanted to do was bring together three things.
And as we wanted to make it easy for people that didn't have technical expertise,
but they had deep subject matter expertise to create a one-page topical website.
The other things we wanted to provide on top of that was sophisticated search engine optimization.
And lastly was monetization.
So a big piece of what we've done at Hubpages is bring together these types of three things.
And we've really focused on monetization doing a lot more in that space now.
We've built extensive technologies in cross-ad network yield optimization,
data services, retargeting services.
We've worked with a lot of the larger buying groups.
And it's going to be a big focus this year in terms of our overall product strategy,
is deep integration of affiliate offers and providing great ways for users to help monetize their content.
Thanks.
And we'll learn more about Hubpages as the panel goes on.
Next up is Jim Eberingham.
He's the CTO and founder of Pixaza,
which has raised nearly $18 million.
Hi, yes.
We founded Pixaza about two and a half years ago,
and did several rounds of funding, as Chris mentioned.
What our business does is we actually take a combination of affiliate links,
and we put them into a platform, and we put a flow of images from publishers' websites in
and allow crowdsourcers to match up by visual or exact similarity.
Affiliate links was what people see in images on publisher sites.
We've been liking a lot to add sense, but for images.
Whereas Google will go out and algorithmically analyze text on a page,
and then place relevant ads, we do that with images.
But unfortunately, image recognition is probably like a hundred-year problem to solve
in the most abstract sense that you would need to be able to do something interesting
with all of the three trillion images on the web.
So we use human crowdsourcing, and I got experience in crowdsourcing
from the previous company.
I was a founder of a company called LiveOps, which I was for seven years prior to that.
And I got some experience in image recognition through speech recognition
at a company called TellMe, which I was on early.
And then prior to that, I ran the browser group at Netscape of all of the versions one through five
releases until we were purchased.
Awesome.
Last but not least, for intros is my good friend Ray Lyle,
president of VigLink, who has secured about two million in financing
from the likes of Google Ventures, First Round Capital, among others.
Good afternoon. How's everyone doing?
Thanks, Chris.
So I guess I started more as a traditional affiliate marketer.
My partner and I started this company out of our houses two and a half years ago,
with no funding without the heavy Silicon Valley connections as we were in Chicago.
And we saw an opportunity to build a tool that basically monetizes user-generated content
without changing the user experience and plugging that into the affiliate space.
So we've seen massive growth over the few years.
We were, you know, profitable day 60, which was a lot of fun.
But the first couple of months were really rough, self-funding this and bootstrapping it.
And not only maybe 18 months later, we were acquired by our Google and First Round Capital Back competitor, VigLink.
So we basically merged the companies, and now I serve as the president of that company.
So we now have a presence within San Francisco and Chicago.
Now we're continuing to grow the business out.
So let me follow up on with Jim and Ray.
And then we'll get back to you, Paul, and on some of your decision-making as relates to monetization.
But for you, Ray, so you're one of the co-founders of driving revenue,
which was more of a niche affiliate, if I'm not mistaken, in the automotive space among others.
What is it about automated technology, so leveraging those affiliate networks that makes VigLink
worthy of several million dollars in financing?
And at least Silicon Valley's bet that somehow you guys are doing something that's innovated within the affiliate space.
Well, I think that overall, you see just a pair of my, a pair of the shift of eyeballs, right?
So everything was content site, and then within 36 months, everything went to user-generated content.
Now within that period, the advertising technologies simply couldn't catch up, right?
So we have, we have a bunch of, you know, some of the technologies here are trying to bridge that gap.
I think that our technology makes it very easy for a publisher to basically deploy our code.
It's as simple as deploying Google Analytics as one line of JavaScript, you could deploy it on your site.
And then you can put any retail you'd like to any retailer like it's automatically affiliateized.
And then there's most importantly, no change to the consumer experience.
So we see a lot of advertising technologies that are very consumer, not friendly, right?
So it's popping up things. The ad doesn't make sense. It's not coherent.
This is totally seamless. So the end user doesn't see anything.
But the publisher still gets credit, and it makes it very easy for the publisher as well to use.
Cool. Jim, in your case, you know, the idea of monetizing using affiliate strategies to monetize images seems to me.
I would have thought that your company would have been founded way back in the infancy of the affiliate space in the late 90s.
What has taken so long? You mentioned this idea of using crowdsourcing versus image recognition.
What makes the crowdsourced approach a work?
And is it really, really difficult to serve accurate advertisements that are high converting,
that could help folks that are affiliate marketers in this room monetize their images on their site?
What's the secret sauce? Is it crowdsourcing?
Yeah, well, actually it is crowdsourcing is the secret sauce.
You know, we discovered a couple of things. One, people make purchases and the type of affiliate links that we work with best in our products.
People usually get interested in something because they see it visually.
And something like 40% of the real estate on the web is image-based.
And it hasn't changed really since the beginning of the web.
Images aren't interactive. People see things that they're interested in, and then they have to go research them outside the publisher's site.
So giving them the ability to get to information that they want that happens to be a product related purchase or link is very valuable to them and the publisher.
And keeping that constraints to the real estate of the image is incremental to the publisher, so it works great for them.
It gets the affiliate links in front of people that are interested in the product, so it works for all of the contingencies in that respect.
It hasn't been possible because one crowdsourcing is newer, and it's not easy to build a big scalable community.
We had arguably built the largest one at LiveOps of 30,000 people working remotely and building a community is very difficult.
Getting the content and converting that to interesting data such as tags and links of an image is high value, and you can definitely get relevant, very relevant, human-picked ads.
And that's key over algorithms because algorithms can get very accurate, but I remember seeing George Lucas in an interview years ago talking about Star Wars and talking about all those special effects.
And he said everyone had to be right because if you just make one wrong, everyone remembers that one.
So even with algorithms, you could have 95% of everything right and that one wrong, that's going to annoy the consumers.
What is the incentive to the crowd?
Well, that's a great question. There's a couple of incentives. Well, they get paid to do it, but those aren't the people that you want to get.
You want the people that are fanatics and passionate. So we're in front of publishers such as Interior Design, Fashion, Autos.
So we enlist crowd sources that are actually fanatics and passionate about those areas. So they do it because they love it.
They like being a part of a community where they can actually converse inside our platform and share ideas.
And they get to make money for something that they love.
One, before we jump to Paul, how often are you wrong, Big Link? How often are you serving, are you sending traffic?
How often are you wrong? Like, so how good is the technology in a short answer?
Yeah.
And the same thing for you, Jim. Just curious, you guys built this sophisticated technology. I just want to know how, you know, from a conversion standpoint, what, how good it is?
I'll go first. I mean, the fun thing about working with Big Link is that all their developers are MIT, Stanford, Harvard, the smartest guys in the world.
So they had built the Starship Enterprise, and it is pretty much flawless, where we were the scrappy affiliate marketer. So to answer the question of one word, it's pretty much flawless. It always works.
But does it always work as you're sending traffic to Amazon and eBay, or are you sending it to a, how deep are you sending it?
Well, I mean, we have, you know, over 10,000 affiliates. So different advertisers?
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, different average merchants rather. So, certainly, Amazon and eBay are always going to be the large players in space.
But it's good.
And I'd be curious once we get to Q&A if anyone in here is using any of the technology, just to share your insights. But how about for you? How good is it? How often are you wrong?
Well, you know, there's always error, you know, so we're not always right, but we're, it's a pretty high percentage. It's over 99% that we're getting something that the user is interested in.
And then by our user experience of forcing clicks to continue to actually verify that they're getting to the information that they want sort of makes it even more accurate.
So I don't know exactly how often we're wrong, but it's not 100%.
But the reason I was asking the question is because I think one of the things I've thought a lot about over the last 10 years is the available inventory that you have to monetize, the traffic that you have, and just keeping an open mind about new and innovative approaches.
So I just wanted to give the audience, you know, a sense that these might be opportunities for them to add some additional monetization of their site.
So let's get your perspective on this poll. I mean, you're one of the sort of legendary startup guys in the Silicon Valley.
You've clearly attracted a lot of funding. You also have a background in SEO, and you're probably less of an affiliate guy and more of a guy who's looking to AB test and do all kinds of sophisticated things.
To make the right decisions about how you monetize the traffic that comes into your site.
So why are these guys interested? What these guys are doing? And how do you think about monetizing web traffic for hub pages? Give us an idea. I'm sorry. Give us an idea also of how much traffic you are dealing with.
So hub pages is a top 50 website. We're about, we're over 45 million unique some month and growing about seven to eight percent month over a month.
So it's growing. It's a very diverse set of traffic. So it ranges from organic gardening to Bollywood. So it's about as diverse as you can get.
I think one of the most interesting things that was said, and there's a lot of commonalities between our two businesses, is that there is a community behind it.
And they're doing a lot of the work around creating value that's within the products.
One of the things that we found that I think is really interesting on hub pages today, we'll place ads, you wouldn't call it algorithmically, we'll cross.
We have tens, if not hundreds of ad networks that we're optimizing, every impression, every user by lots of different factors.
But probably the most efficient thing that's programmed on hub pages today are the authors programming very specific, specific offers.
So for example, we have an Amazon capsule on hub pages. Someone can create an article. Let's say they're making one on bottled water. What's the freshest bottled water you can get.
And they can select those products. And those products that they select in place in their pages by far the most efficient in terms of the monetization for the real estate and the engagement by the users.
So I think it's pretty fascinating that everything you can do with a lot of algorithmically driven options today, but still humans placing the offer in the pages is what I see as the best performing option.
How do you avoid clutter? How do you avoid hub pages not looking like just a made for ad sense site?
Well, it's one of the, it's a challenge because everybody has a different idea, particularly if you take a Midwestern woman in the United States who cares about, you know, if you make $30 or $40 a month, this meaningful income tour.
She has a very different idea of what's a pretty page versus a say a retired techno file who doesn't want any pictures, doesn't want anything on his page, just wants a blob of text.
The woman will really care a lot about having spacer graphics and things like that. So beauties in the eye of the beholder, I think it's one of the things that we try to do is create a canvas that gives them enough flexibility but without being overwhelming.
And then considering user experience is one of those things like, you know, what do you cover content with pop ups and things like that? And those are things that we tend to avoid.
Just your perspectives as well. I mean, I think in both cases, cases, Jim, you know, I will actually just ask the question.
So why does Pixazza not create clutter? What's the, why is it something that is innovative and people should consider?
Well, we actually have options which the publisher can configure their user experience one. And next we try to constrain the user experience by default to the real state of the image.
And we try to give it in a graduated user interface that people get hints on what they can do as to not cover it until that there is a very gesture that we're sure about that they're requesting information.
We do our best in that case. There's nothing you can do to reduce clutter because exactly what Paul said is beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And you know, we'll, if you're giving people information that they want, it's not clutter. But as soon as you're giving them information that they don't want, it is.
So that's a very, it's a very hard thing to measure. But it's an interesting, we, it's something we talk about quite a bit internally. Right?
Well, it's interesting from our perspective as our technologies almost somewhat invisible. It really runs behind the scenes.
We get this question every week. It's a publisher will take our code, they'll install it and they'll call us up and they'll be screaming at us like, this doesn't work.
We're like, okay, well, why doesn't it? Why are you saying that? Well, we don't see anything. It's like, well, you're not supposed to see anything. And they're like, oh, now we get it. You know, there's that aha moment.
So we've kind of every product that we've put out onto the marketplace, put it into the marketplace. We've tried to have that same perspective of, you know, we kind of grew the business out of the forum space and they're very vocal.
Especially if you bring some intrusive advertising unit and they're going to let you know as opposed to a content site where you can basically do whatever you want and users may just go away.
But they're not going to post about how terrible it is. So we've been very cognizant of that and really the mantra of driving revenue was always, you know, pioneering consumer friendly monetization.
So really trying to figure out how to make publishers money without upsetting the user base.
Paul, coming back to you. So, I mean, you started to do to kind of outline your decision making.
But can you go into some more detail about how you guys are making decisions to go with say a pixaza versus a big link versus a Google ad sense versus, you know, embedding an affiliate offer on your own.
You know, what are some of the techniques and strategies and how sophisticated is it or isn't it?
So the, on the affiliate side is really it's about creating tools for the authors to program into their site.
And we leave it up to the author too. It's one of the areas that we see that it's probably the fastest growing category on hub pages is largely driven by the tools that we create for them.
So to give you an example again with Amazon is we created some use to just be able to pick a product or do a search and add a little widget to your page.
And then we created some very light tools around writing a description giving you a few more, giving you a few more formatting options and being able to add a little bit richer information organizing the things a little bit better.
And that when authors had the opportunity to do that, it grew over six acts over the last 12 months. So just shopping revenue from affiliate offers.
When it comes down to ad networks, we look at, there's a couple dimensions that really matter when it comes to optimizing ad networks.
There's, there's, we are, we're large ad sense users as well as lots of other ad networks. And so there's a set of rules that are driven behind all these different ad networks.
Are there a lot of ad sense publishers out here in the room today? Just curious are there other people out here that are actually using online ad networks to demonetize their sites handful of you guys?
So there are a few more that keep coming out there. So ad sense is a fantastic, is a fantastic ad network. And I think it's, I think it's the strongest.
And from all the data we see it's getting stronger than, than all the other ad networks at a pretty rapid clip. But there's certain limitations. So a lot of publishers have a three ad limitation.
So if you want four ads, you got to figure out which three ads should ad sense go in. And then what is the fourth to play?
So, so placements a large dimension that we optimize across. The other one is geography. Certain ad networks do a lot better at monetizing UK and Canadian traffic.
So people, if you're using say all of media in the UK is pretty strong. It's better than say ad.com.
So you have to make decisions by geography. And then the last, the last two that I think are really important.
One is the referring source of traffic. So if anyone's ever run any, run any test around a monetizing say ad sense from someone that comes from natural search versus somebody that's browse from Facebook.
They have very different engagement characteristics with the ads and the monetization differs dramatically.
So if you can look at your source of refers and make a decision to give the search traffic ad sense and say the social traffic to one of the more display oriented ad networks, that's a big, big lever as well.
I have two more questions. And then we're going to take it from us talking to each other to you guys kind of asking questions. So get your questions ready.
The first question is Ray. So how, in many ways you guys are like almost like a sub network of these, I'm sure you're pulling your offers from commission junction and link share and others.
What, I guess can you talk a little bit about how publishers, how many publishers are in this room? How many of you are advertisers?
Okay, so it's mostly publishers. How could they make money using your technology?
Well, our premise of our technology is it makes it a lot easier for all the publishers to do affiliate marketing.
So in theory, anyone in this room could do exactly what we're doing. However, it would take you forever to do.
So, for instance, the process as you guys, most of you know of taking a retail link and then swapping it out for an affiliate link, finding the right affiliate network that it belongs to and then actually posting it as a very tedious process.
So what our technology does is it automatically knows what, what affiliate network that retail link is supposed to get it and automatically affiliates it.
So it gives the publisher more time to work on what's most important, which is producing content rather than trying to figure out how to affiliateize things.
And not only we do that, but the technology is seamless. So there is no redirect. So at least it's not apparent that there's a redirect.
So there's no very odd link to a Best Buy, it just says Best Buy.com or the retail link. So it's a much better consumer experience for the users.
But really, it saves a lot of time. And then because we manage all of these programs, all these publishers, of course we get paid out at a better tier as well.
So that also helps with the cut that we take. So the publishers actually make money by using us and makes it basically an impossible task possible.
VIG, VIG, LiNK. And Jim, how about you as well? What's the value to the 100 or so publishers in the room who just raised their hand?
Sure. Well, there's a couple of different values. One, first we install our technology and we start sending you checks. That's at the simplest answer.
But our technology is very easy to install. It's one line of script. Just as you would install Google Analytics, put it in your header footer, then you can go into our interface and configure it, however you would like.
There's a couple of different offerings that we have, including crowdsourced product placement inside images. All the way to, we also power Google AdSense using the context of the image that is generated from tags that our crowdsource used to actually do an overlay on the image on mouse over.
These actually perform really well. So it's very easy to install. And there's one other offering that we do have which is a automatically generated product guide for your site that takes all of the crowdsource to data from the images combined with the associated links and creates a deep link product pages that become like a product guide for your site.
If you have one that would make sense for that to have, this generates, it's been optimized for the search engine so it generates natural search traffic. They get incredibly high RPMs because we're getting users directly to the information they want from Google natural search or Yahoo.
So my final question for you guys is, how do you attract capital? How do you attract the interest of some of the cash that you guys have raised? We'll start with you.
Yeah, raising money is hard. I'm really, really hard. So just a little, our story on Hub pages is we had been part of a previous successful startup and we were at Microsoft with reasonable, reasonable experience in building consumer products.
We knew quite a few people in the valley. We actually in Seattle, we decided to move back to the valley because that's where that's where the majority of the money is. It's easier to do it there.
We moved into a garage. We left, so just to give a sense of what we did. At a brand new baby, my two co-founders were just getting engaged to get married. We all moved into a house, so it was under construction.
I probably have cancer from asbestos because it was falling down all around us. We sat in this garage day and night. We slept on mats and we had a cat that peed on our sleeping bags.
It wasn't very glamorous and we worked really, really hard around the clock to build V1 or the site. We took a very conservative, because it wasn't the point that we were in a personal financial positions where we didn't really have to go to that extreme.
It's also kind of the type of people we are. We did that for seven months. We basically built V1 and then we went out and raised our first $2 million, which was pre-launch. There's two inflection points in a company. There's one where you're raising on the dream.
So just to give you a sense of we raised on the dream, we built the product and we were lucky enough to get a couple venture guys that were willing to put some money in and ultimately went with Hummer Windblad, who's a fantastic early-stage venture fund.
Then we launched and man, 1,500 people used Hubpages the first month. I don't know if any of you guys have tried to make a living or support San Francisco Bay Area engineers on 1,500 visitors to a consumer UGC website. It's not pretty.
So from there we were able to raise money before you actually have real metrics because you're selling that dream. Nothing destroys a good business like real numbers.
And then the second one is when the business is growing and you've kind of proven it and that's when you go around. I give two pieces of advice that people are out there trying to raise money.
One is I would say get a Bay Area attorney that's well connected if you don't have current contacts. And mostly other guys that I know that I'm always happy to, if someone's got a business idea and who says, hey, I really want to meet some VC guys and I'm happy to bet it and pass it on.
Getting an attorney that can connect you and help you through that initial process is a great way to start.
Yeah, so thanks. In your case, you guys have raised a colossal $18 million in a minute or less. What are some tips for the audience here?
A minute or less. Come on. I want to give them. I want to give them as much time as possible.
Absolutely. Well, first off, yeah, we raised a couple of rounds. We've raised a total of somewhere close to $18 million.
Previous company we did close to $100 million. And the one before that was $250 million. You could have two minutes.
Anyway, so how do you track the how do you attract that kind of look? First, first, like Silicon Valley is a lot like Hollywood, you're always as good as your last movie.
So as long as you keep making money for VCs, they're going to keep reinvesting. But getting that first VC, that takes them work in under a minute. I'm going to try and do it.
But the best thing is to keep going to some networking functions in the valley and ask for advice and to go around and speak with as many VCs and ask what they're looking for.
Now, the second thing is to assemble a great team. A really good technology team. Somebody with some experience. And if you don't have that, you have to have a prototype just getting some traction.
So if you store, keep selling on the dream, like you said, is exactly what you need to do all the way through an IPO.
I mean, what does Silicon Valley create? Do we create technology? No, we actually create stock, honestly, if you want me to get right down to it. I have what is stock? It's a story. And you just can't answer how big can it get as soon as someone answers how big can it get? You're dead.
So I mean, I remember when Google was hitting 700 to share, were they too expensive? I don't know how big can it get.
You have to keep a good story. And then if you can show traction on that story, then you're going to get follow on investments.
I would argue though, people always say, oh, you raise so much money. It's like, no, I'm a horrible entrepreneur. The good one is the guy that raised $2 million and made a billion dollar company.
So raise as little money as possible, but don't hurt yourself. Awesome. Awesome. Right. So you, you know, you were acquired by, they came to you, right? But since you've been with Vigilink now for how long?
About four or five months now.
What kind of perspective? And you already had said to the audience that you're more of an affiliate marketer. You're not a Silicon Valley native.
And what could you share from your perspective? How did you get noticed? And how could they get noticed?
Yeah, it's a funny story. You know, when we started the company, we actually talked to Google and a very, very senior person at Google who was one of the, you know, probably top 20 founders there. It was a terrible idea, right?
And the irony is, you know, two years later, they funded a company. They funded a company to compete with us and then turned bias.
But, you know, personally, you know, I put my financial self at a huge risk. You know, we started this company. I was presented with the idea of my business partner had the idea. I had all the affiliate connections.
I quit my job. Luckily, I didn't have kids or family to support, but I did have a pretty expensive house in a car and I didn't have any savings like every bachelor, right?
So I, I had cut it really thin. I had cut it so thin that their repo man was looking for my car and I was three months behind in my house and like my phone, I would just shut off because every bill collector would be calling out stop.
Not only that, trying to run a business. So I'm working 18 hours a day, not making any money, but I knew the money was coming and thank God it came like at the last hour.
But we, at the same time, we had people that were trying to invest in us. We had like small people, you know, some of our publishers were trying to give us a couple hundred thousand and a half million to buy in. And here I am, I can't eat.
And I'm passing up a check for a half million dollars because I think that, you know, in 60 days, I'll be okay. Luckily, it played out that way.
And so we kind of took the approach that, you know, what we're cashable positive and we're going to keep our mouth shut and we're going to keep on growing the business while our competitors would go out there and be back.
The interesting thing, there's an old saying, I mean, you know, the companies in the valley are usually not profitable and the profitable companies are, you know, in Rockford, Illinois, or you know, some small town that you've never even heard of and they're just killing it because they're profitable and they keep their mouth shut.
But it's a different model. It's a cash business. So now since being acquired by vaguely, it's a different story. Now it's less about, it's more about the overall potential, like what could we grow this business to?
So it's no longer like, hey, we have to worry about kind of cash and being profitable. It's more like, hey, we need to, we need to have money, we need to raise, we need to make the connections to grow this into a giant business.
So it's interesting to see both sides of the story.
Awesome. First question. We have just a, we have a roving microphone. So who you are, your name, company, and your favorite color.
Okay, I'll start pink slash fuchsia. My name is Edmi Kendall and in this, for this question, the context is as a publisher.
And the question is for Paul of Hubpages. So Paul, if I'm someone with lots of content, I'm going to be thinking about publishing on a bunch of different platforms, right?
Maybe if I'm pretty credentialed or whatnot, I might become an about.com guide. I might decide if I'm a little bit lower brow, I might go and just start a WordPress blog and whatnot.
And then that consideration set, Hubpages is going to fall into one of my options. And so as a user, I could see that maybe having the space or graphics or other functionality that you've introduced is going to be the thing that tips me over to Hubpages.
So the question is really about getting into the mindset of your writers to what degree are they swayed by the actual functional offerings that you have versus, you know, what is my average revenue per thousand page views? Like how sophisticated are they?
And are you, you mentioned earlier in your intro, you're going to really start focusing on monetization and optimizing like the yield optimization.
And are you doing that precisely because you find more writers asking for that?
Yeah. So one of the reasons we think Hubpages has exceeded in the space, it's, you know, it's incredible. You just outlined it. There's tons and tons of choices.
It's probably the most competitive business in the world in terms of publishing tools today. It's right up there.
So the one thing that I think we do really well at Hubpages is we really listen to our users well. And first and foremost, Hubpages is a community.
It's one of the things that people on the outside don't often get. They kind of look at and they say, wow, you know, there's just this tons of content ranging all over the board and am I making a personal decision.
But a lot of people come to Hubpages because they're interested in getting started. A lot of people stay because they get hooked on the community.
On the monetization side, it's one of the areas that people have just asked for when we go out and we talk to them right now, they say, hey, we want more options.
And we see what's working now. We've got a lot of data. So that's that's why we're we're in best out space. I don't know if I fully answer your question.
But the reason Hubpages also does well is because when you're part of a community, it's, we've run numerous tests here. I don't know.
Anyone started a blog here? I'm just curious. Anyone started it? Are you still writing it or did you stop it?
So one of the things that happens we see with with writers all the time is they come in and they they'll start blogs.
And they'll go to WordPress, they'll go to blog spot, they'll go to Tumblr, there's posters, you know, you name it.
But what happens is is when you're not part of a site that's constantly keeping fresh content coming in, that traffic, you tend to have a curve that goes like this.
You get a little traffic front and then it stops. And if you're trying to get natural search traffic, the chances are that if you haven't stuck with this for years,
that you're never going to crack through that and start getting natural search traffic.
When you're on Hubpages, if you're part of a community that keeps that site living and breathing every day, there's 13,000 pieces of unique content and growing like crazy.
Every single day that's getting published on Hubpages. And so what we're finding is that people that are really sophisticated and understanding their analytics,
they're actually saying today they're going to start their content businesses there because they realize they get more traffic.
They can have, they don't have to keep adding fresh content all the time, they get some of the other benefits that's part of being a community member provides than being on your own.
Sorry, just a quick, this is just a quick, quick follow on.
What percentage of your users are uniquely publishing on Hubpages versus redundant, like it's a secondary outlet for them?
That's a really good question. I don't know, we know our authors publish all over the place. I will tell you this is the top, the top, couple percentile on Hubpages account for a ton of the success.
So there's a big curve in terms of what those power users do.
Next question. Your name, where you're from, and if you have a dog, what's his or her name?
I have a cat. Her name is Talula. My name is Sarah Purcell. Right now I am an affiliate marketer. I do have a business plan and an amazing,
business partner who is amazing with Java and CSS, and that's not my specialty.
But when you talk about assembling a sharp tech team, what else, as far as assembling an initial team, what members of that team would you?
I'll just jump in really quick comments of that. So I get this question all the time. It's like, hey, you know, my best friend and I are going to start this company.
And they're both like outgoing girls or outgoing guys, and they both have the same skill set. So it's like, okay, well, first of all, don't go and business with your own friends, don't pick, you know, usually.
But you have to find people who have the opposite skill set, right? So, and especially when you're trying to create a really lean team in the beginning, right?
So if you're good at content and you're good at the affiliate side, then you need to find a partner that can code, right?
And just having that is a good compliment. But beyond that, then it kind of gets a little bit more complicated.
But it's good to initially just bring someone in that is a completely different skill set that kind of rounds out what your company is going to try to do.
Thank you.
Next question.
Next question.
There's got to be another question in this room.
Now, okay. So from my perspective, I think one of the takeaways is that, you know, traditional affiliate marketing, you know, the big three networks, if you will.
Or I should say the big four or five, right?
You know, a lot of the affiliate marketers in the room probably rely on them. Paul, you were mentioning before that, you know, you're looking at display, you're looking at contextual.
Of course, you guys represent other options.
You know, is there is there anything? Is it a hard metric like a CTR, you know, a certain metric that you're looking at that makes the decision whether to go with an affiliate offer over a display or over a contextual?
That's a really interesting question.
The way we look at monetization across hub pages is we break it down. So hub pages is fairly broad question, answer forums, profile pages and hubs.
We break all our revenue down to revenue per thousand hubs, and then we break it down by category.
So there are categories that we've identified that we think would monetize a lot better today with affiliate offers.
And even seeing what CJ said is they'd be a lot better monetized with affiliate offers placed by people.
And so that's really how we think about it. So we take that all that revenue and we look at the, there's 6,000.
We have 6,000 different slices of hub pages, different categories and growing. And then we look at the RPMs and those categories and trying to match up where the opportunities are for affiliate offers to be in there.
Do you only use, Jim, do you only use affiliate offers or is there other?
No, we use other offers as well. In fact, we're also an affiliate network ourselves, just like Commission Junction, Linkshare, Google Affiliate.
But we do integrate them as well.
We, in combination with how the publisher configures with how the crowdsourcer decides to choose, which is based a lot on the information provided by the affiliate program to come up with an end result.
For, we sit in front of a lot of traffic. We see a lot of different types of publishers.
It's, you know, the technology, when we're on a site, technology seems to work better on the publishers who really focus on a great consumer experience.
We definitely see a lot of publishers that look like they're trying to monetize their site every which way, sideways you can imagine.
Well, they'll install 80 to 100 different types of technology and networks where it takes two minutes to load their page.
We definitely see a higher success rate from our technology. And I imagine that ours isn't unique in that respect for the publishers that really concentrate on a nice, clean user experience.
Is there anyone in the room that's concerned about a big link or a pixaza? Is there anyone that thinks that this isn't a step in the right direction for the affiliate industry?
Anyone? Shall I hands?
The only reason I ask is because I spoke on a panel with big link in New York and there were a couple of outspoken people who were trying to make the argument that what they were doing wasn't the right direction.
What do you feel is that way?
Absolutely.
I don't think they're doing anything.
Where are you from?
In the last book you read.
The last book. I'm a periodical reader.
I read the most actually.
But I'm from New York and my name is Roy Weissman.
But I think everything they're doing is exactly what technology and the internet is about making efforts more efficient.
One of the biggest problems with the affiliate marketplace is these complicated links you spend copy, paste, and then it might not be right and if you put it in wrong, it's like,
there's really two factions of people, both many factions, but two, you have your business people and you have your technical people.
Technical people could copy and paste links all day.
They think it's better than sliced bread.
Business people, one copy and paste, it's painful.
But the business people are trying to be strategic and everybody is, how can I grow my business faster and how can I focus on new strategies and new ideas?
And the more tools you have that are efficient and reliable to do this, it gives you more options to be creative to find new ways to grow the business.
So I can, as a business person, understand why everybody from the merchants to the affiliates wouldn't be delighted because if you make something, you make something, the more money everybody can make.
So I can't say there'd be a negative. The only negative would be, you know, if the tools don't develop or if the merchants make it harder or if they put more conditions and more issues or more fees or they put obstacles in the way.
If everybody works together and makes it a seamless transition, it's only going to make everybody more money. That's just my take on it.
I like this guy. Yeah, what periodicals are you reading? I want some.
Question in the back of the room.
Let's see, I did the book. Well, you get the book one. So your name, where you're from, and the last vacation that you've taken. Just where?
Michelle Hall McCaffrey from Vancouver, BC, and last vacation in San Diego.
My question is you'd mentioned AdSense and all of media for UK. What was the one for Canada?
I said all of media for Canada.
Thank you.
I think there's another question right back there, sir.
I'll tell you an interesting fact that Canadian CPMs are beating US CPMs now. I don't know how many people know that, but I find that fascinating.
Just on Revenue Apex LA.
My questions around metrics and benchmarks. I know you obviously can't share projections and where you're tracking.
Many of us here run coverage paths. We know that if we had a dollar on a coverage path, we're happy.
A lot of e-mailers in the house. They know what type of metrics they're getting.
What do you look at for like our poo type of metrics or revenue per transaction or revenue per user within the respective industry or within the respective groups here?
And, you know, to the degree that you can share where you are or where you hope to be or maybe you can genericize the numbers if you can't share specifics.
Yeah, I'll start there.
Hub pages will do between $9 and $10 million in gross revenue this year.
And the revenue per thousand hubs, per thousand hub views, so those are our article views.
Is between $12 and $15 today?
I'm the content side. Most of that's about 70% natural search traffic.
Guys?
Well, yeah, that's a more complicated question for me to answer because I get my technology stands in front of publishers that are all over the world.
So we measure the way that we measure our revenue or we add incremental is by a revenue per engagement of that publisher's user into our technology.
So, you know, it's potentially an RPM.
We see everything from a 30 cent RPM all the way up to $120 RPM.
So there's not, it just depends on where the publisher is, the type of the content, the type of images, how big they are, what type of products are being placed and how they configure it.
So, Ray, do you have anything to say on that?
You know, with our corporate product, because we don't change the direction of where the publisher or the user has chosen that retailing to go to, we're somewhat crippled in what we can do, right?
So part of the levers that we have is overall merchant coverage and negotiating stronger deals with the merchants to then pass that down to the publishers.
Besides that, we don't currently take an Amazon link and send it to eBay because we know we can make more money in eBay hypothetically.
Any final questions?
Okay, you know, we appreciate your time.
Everyone, as you walked in, should have been given an evaluation form.
Just go ahead and take that and circle the five for all of the answers, or I'm sorry, the questions.
Now, I'm getting filled that out, take the time now and hand it on the way out.
Enjoy the rest of the conference.
I believe there's a keynote that is up in just a couple of minutes.
Have a safe lights home or safe drives home wherever you are and hope to see you at affiliate summit east.
Thank you.
Thank you.