Music
Good afternoon.
So we're here in this session to talk about unique partnerships for publisher success.
It's really about how publishers, networks, and advertisers can work together to grow revenue, to succeed, the challenges they may face, and how they overcome them.
So before we get started, we're going to let the panelists introduce themselves.
So John, do you want to kick us off?
Yeah, my name is John Toskey, and I'm a director at Ebay Partner Network based out of Seattle.
And my background have been in Ebay for about two, two and a half years.
Before that, I was a publisher for about seven years.
And before that, I worked at Blue Nile Management.
They're a affiliate program, and I've worked at a couple other online retailers in Seattle as well.
So I've been in this space for about 10, 15 years, and I absolutely love affiliate marketing.
I'm Oliver Rup, I'm the founder CEO of Big Link.
I started Big Link in 2009, actually as part of a business school business plan competition.
Prior to that, I was at Microsoft, or did a few things that most notably started the team that does TV and movie downloads for the Xbox.
Engineering background, this is my 10th affiliate summit, and I too love affiliate marketing.
Did you win the competition?
No, no.
I'm Jessica Spira, I'm the senior director of business development for the Commerce Group at Zift Davis.
We are a network of publishing sites in tech gaming, men's lifestyle, and deals.
I've been there about 18 months, I'm relatively new to affiliate marketing, but I've been in the digital media space for longer than I actually care to tell you.
In various roles in business development, with everything from traditional publishing, where we opened up digital content to regular content media sites.
And my name is Ethan Davidov, and the vice president of advertising technology at risk IQ.
And we are a solutions provider that helps create transparency and trust into the affiliate ecosystem, helping networks and advertisers specifically into understanding how their affiliates and publishers are sourcing their traffic and compliance with regards to their policies.
So it's only fitting that we work with these folks in a unique way, so we thought that was fitting for me to moderate the panel today.
All right.
So to kick it off, Jessica, so do you work with FigLink, or do you work with EPN, and if so, why, and how do you work with them?
Okay, so I can start with EPN. We have sort of a twofold relationship.
We acquired a deal site about 13 months ago that had a pretty longstanding relationship with EPN. On the zip content, the premium content sites, we had no relationship until we started to see, we sort of looked into the data and saw these incredible results on the deal side.
And I've started to integrate eBay much more onto our premium content sites. With FigLink, we use FigLink when we don't have a direct relationship with a merchant, and also when we open up new sites.
So we're an acquisitive company. If we purchase a content site, and we haven't put our commerce engine on it, FigLink is a great way to get commerce started.
And also when we open up maybe more international sites where maybe we haven't really developed an internal group there, FigLink is a great solution for us.
John, how do you work with FigLink?
Yeah, so we've had a relationship with FigLink for years, and I'd say about two and a half, three years ago before I started, we only let through maybe five percent of the applications into our program directly.
So FigLink has always been a very important strategic partner for us because it helps us expand our distribution reach elsewhere.
They have unique technology that we don't have, that other partners value, and so for us it's a way to get more exposure and more distribution.
And Oliver, how do you work with EPN and why do you do so?
So if you don't mind, I'm just going to tell a very quick story from the founding of the company. The way I decided to make BigLink was this whole affiliate marketing thing sounded interesting, but it seemed really complicated.
And so I wrote a crawler to go around the web and look for links to, you know, major retailer you might have heard of.
And I found that there was a nutty bit.
And I found that those links were only affiliated less than half the time. So all those publishers could in theory have manipulated their links to get paid by that retailer, but more than half the time they weren't doing it.
And so that seemed like a very clear opportunity, and so we started approaching publishers and advertisers and saying, you know, we can help connect you if you'll let us take a cut in the middle.
So, you know, eBay is a major advertiser, you know, a major buyer of traffic that our publishers want to sell traffic to and we help them do that.
So, John, why do you think that networks are branching out and looking for unique partnerships today?
Yeah, well, I mean, the world's changed a lot and again, not to date anybody. But, you know, 10, 10, 15 years ago, it was people have websites and they want to build links and make money.
And who a publisher is today is different than it was even just two or three years ago. And where we look to find distribution, whether it's somebody who is an influencer that just happens to have a big social media following.
I don't know who the next generation of affiliates are. So, it's in my best interest to try to find partners that have their hands in a lot of places that I might not be thinking about or that this new generation of partners are going to go seek out a solution.
And particularly with big link, they work across lots of different advertisers. They have interesting technologies and I'm positive that there are partners that are going to sign up with them and their network that are not thinking about eBay. So, it's an opportunity for me.
Oliver, how do you discover new publishers to bring into your network?
So, we take lots of tactics. You know, the most common is we come to places like this. We reach out, we crawl the web. You know, we have sort of proprietary crawling technology that really goes and scours the web looking for potentially interesting customers.
And we just take, you know, we think of a publisher all the way down to a single individual with a Twitter account, you know, tweeting. That publishers can be that small. And I think, you know, the advertisers and networks are unlikely to be optimized to reach out for publishers at that small scale.
Jessica, how do you think that publishers benefit from these types of partnerships between big link and EPN?
Well, I mean, it's a great way to monetize your content, right? So, we're on the premium content side as if we are traditional in the sense that we sell display, CPM based advertising. And that's one revenue stream.
But to be able to diversify and have a direct response element to be able to include commerce gives us an additional revenue stream, one that's been very lucrative. And in addition, we're creating a really good user experience.
So on PC Mag, if you're reviewing a Dell laptop, that users come in because they wanted to find out information about this Dell laptop, it just makes sense that they could hit a link and go purchase that laptop.
That's just sort of contextually relevant information. We end up monetizing that and, you know, Dell sells a computer.
All right, I'm going to skip the used eBay, but anyway, we do sell those.
Excellent. So, what are some of the challenges that you, you know, that we come across and working together? What are the types of issues that come up, John?
Well, you know, I kind of alluded to it earlier, you know, eBay for many years had a very tight closed program. And there certainly are concern that having a partnership is a side door to the program.
Can we feel as confident about the quality of the traffic we're getting? Is there activity that goes against our program terms that for, you know, all of our may not be able to detect it or may not have this as a startup company.
None of the resources to basically be as active in determining some of that. So, that's the biggest one. And I think it's been one that we've worked really hard over the last couple of years to make sure that there's enough partnership and transparency to identify them and solve them.
And at the end of the day, you know, he understands it's in his best interest to make sure that those issues are addressed and that if we don't feel like they are being addressed, then the partnership won't work.
Oliver, what are your thoughts?
I think this really comes down to what I call the agency problem, right? Imagine you're selling your house. You know, if you're a very sophisticated seller, you don't need an agent, you can just sell your own house.
If you're not that sophisticated as seller, you probably want to get an agent to operate in your best interest. And if you find the buyer's agent saying, you know, I'll just represent you as well, alarm bells should be going off in your head, right?
You're probably not getting the best possible deal. So, I'd say Vicklink and, you know, our peers offer services as a seller's agent, right, to the help the publisher get the best possible deal.
Now, of course, you know, as John just talked about, we need to maintain a relationship with the buyers such that, you know, they want to continue doing business with us.
I think if we're a side door for fraud to get into EPN or any other advertising network, we'll quickly lose that relationship and become uninteresting to the publisher and just, you know, perish.
At the same time, though, I think, you know, there is sort of leverage the other way, right, where I think we can say to the Ebays and the other merchants of the world, look, you're not the only buyer in the world.
Our publishers are looking to get the highest possible price for their traffic. And so, there's some element of price competition. We're in fact trying to drive the price up.
So, it's an interesting trade-off, right, where we try to represent the publisher's interest. We have to, you know, work with our advertisers constructively enough that they see value in it and they want to keep working with us.
But we're not just, you know, tell us what you want and we'll give it to you because we do seek to, frankly, drive up the price over time for the publisher.
You know, an advertiser in an ideal world, I think, would get all traffic very cheaply. And I think, you know, eBay is even a special case because they're both a network and an advertiser.
I think when you look at a commission junction, you know, you could have a publisher, a seller's agent like Big Link, a buyer's agent like commission junction, and then the advertiser themselves like Home Depot.
And there's a lot of sort of agency push pull in that relationship that, you know, is complex.
Jessica, from the publisher's perspective, what are some of the challenges that you see is, you know, working with networks and direct with advertisers?
I think, you know, our challenges are going to be a little bit different. When we look at advertisers, you know, we don't always have every advertiser come into our program.
So we really need to vet them, you know, because we manage to an RPC, so commission has to be a certain level, conversion rates have to be a certain level.
And the reputation of the merchant has to be one where, if we're surfacing that link, we're sort of putting more than sort of, we're putting a seal of approval on it and saying this is a reputable merchant.
So that's one of the ways that we vet and potentially an issue. When it really comes to issues, I think some of it may be around data.
Every single platform, I mean, just from really my perspective, every single platform has a different dashboard.
And they all look different and they're all used differently and they all have different terminology and you're all downloading the spreadsheet in a different way.
And honestly, it's a huge hassle. So for us, it's, you know, the data is an issue. Are we getting the data in a timely manner so that we can make decisions on the fly as we monetize?
And optimize, I should say.
And speaking of data, you know, what kind of data sharing across, again, the networks, publishers, how can we share data in a way to create more value to the entire ecosystem?
And what are we doing today and maybe what could be better moving forward?
Well, you know, from my perspective, you know, we're trying to give, as a matter of fact, we're trying to actively, you know, ask Oliver and Jessica for the matter of what's important to them and then working to try to figure out how we can deliver that in a meaningful way.
I think in particular with our relationship, you know, we certainly understand that that Oliver's highly dependent on our ability to get him data in a timely fashion.
When I have problems, it affects him downstream and then it hurts me in the long run because he's got other places to send that traffic at the end of the day and if he can't count on me getting it to him, then I'm going to get impacted by that.
The other direction back, I think, again, a lot of it is this idea of transparency and trust that we're both networks at the end of the day.
And I want to understand who he's sending me traffic from and have some little bit of visibility into what are those domains, who are these companies.
But there's a lot of trust that asks you when it at, right? Like, we have to look each other in the eye and I'm not taking up the phone, calling whatever.com that, you know, they shouldn't be working with Oliver and that's the relationship that we built.
Oliver, how many roughly, if you can share, how many publishers are in the Big Link network?
It's hundreds of thousands representing millions of domains.
So with hundreds of thousands of publishers, you know, you and John, you have trust and a relationship, you guys know each other well.
How do you, you know, kind of let these folks coming in the door? How do you keep a watch on them?
What are some of the things that Big Link looks at when it comes to network quality?
So, you know, it's been an evolving process and, you know, I think as we've alluded to, it hasn't been bump free.
You know, not just with eBay, but with other advertisers. You know, certainly there are bad actor publishers who, you know, work with eBay, get kicked out and their first move is to come to us.
And when we find them, kick them out, their next move is to go to a competitor, you know, and when they run the road there, they start a new site and start all over.
You know, we look for lots of different things, you know, indicative of fraud.
And honestly, the best one is money, right? You know, fraud isn't working if it's not making money.
And so when we see an account, you know, suddenly spike or, you know, that notably money, we go look and we sort of figure out what's going on here.
And, you know, we pay net 60. So typically, you know, attempted fraud does not actually result in any cash arriving in the publisher's hands.
You know, which specific signals we use? Candlely, I'd rather not say, but, you know, we use a number.
We're always trying to get smarter. We're looking at vendors. And frankly, the fraudsters get smarter too.
I mean, I think the techniques they used to try, they don't even try anymore, but they have much more sophisticated, blended, you know, human-seeming traffic that's harder to detect.
The fraud market is definitely evolved in the affiliate space quite tremendously, I would say. So traffic blending is a, it's an interesting problem to solve.
A lot of the folks, you'll hear a lot about, you know, is this bot traffic? Is this a real human or, you know, a non-human?
But the reality is that, you know, with other types of software that might be installed, there might be automated actions, but it's still a real, you know, human being is computer.
So it definitely makes the landscape tricky as it continues to evolve. Jessica, what other, what other types of partnerships, you know, with networks, with advertisers?
What are some of the exciting things that you guys are looking at doing moving forward in 2015?
Okay. So, because we've got a network of premium content sites, I think there are more opportunities for us to play with content and to partner in ways that are different than a typical coupon site or on our, our, our deal site.
So, one of the things we did this past summer, actually with eBay, was from our gaming and entertainment site IGN.
So, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies releases, this is a very big deal for the IGN audience. There's a ton of merchandise, new merchandise and also collectibles.
So, we had our commerce writer curate a collection on eBay, powered by IGN, and we wrote about it and drove traffic to it. So, great example of, I mean, I thought of, of eBay and a content site working closely together.
We've worked with other merchants around industry events like E3 on the gaming site, where product is released and an merchant may have that product immediately.
We drive traffic to it with a news announcement that, you know, PS4 has come out. Or, just this past CES, we did some content sharing with another merchant, where they were developing content around CES and new products.
And we, at PC Mag, had a team on the ground covering CES. So, we're looking to do more around content sharing with some of the big merchants and creating content experiences that I think are just a little bit different than what we do sort of on our day-to-day basis, which are just like reviews and rankings and coupons.
And Jessica, if you could give advice to other potential publishers in the room about how to, you know, engage with John or Oliver or folks like them, what advice would you give to other publishers about how to approach partnerships?
That is a good question. You know, I think as if we have a bit of an advantage because we're large. And so, when we call up, if I'm calling up a gaming merchant,
and I say I'm from IGN, the phone gets picked up right away. I mean, it's an easy calling card. I think in any of these relationships, honesty and transparency is really helpful.
I, you know, again, I have the advantage of having an account manager. I don't know if I'm really giving you great advice about how to get into these, but I have the advantage of having an account manager at eBay. We have the advantage of having account managers at all of these merchants.
And we have a lot of communication whether it's weekly phone calls or bi-weekly phone calls or continual email. A lot of it is just a free-flowing of information.
And when something happens on our site that's maybe somewhat negative, you know, if we ever impacted by SEO change or something, I'm pretty transparent about what's happened.
Because at the end of the day, it's not a partnership that's just going to be for the next 60 days or the next quarter, so I can make my number. It's a partnership that I want to have for years to come and grow.
So they're always going to be these bumps, but we have to kind of grow together. In order to just get in, I would, you know, I don't know, tactically, I guess LinkedIn would be the best way to do it, and to network and to sort of find what your value proposition is. Why are you different in the market than another competitor, what you can bring to the table?
And John and Oliver, on the other side, I mean, is there any advice that you'd have for other networks or advertisers on how to leverage partnerships and unique partnerships with publishers and the like?
Sure. You know, I'd say my goal is to, or Big Link's goal, is to get to a state with, you know, both Jessica and John, where they call us and say essentially, you know, we could work directly, you know, Jessica, John or some other publisher, but we know we'll make more money by working through you.
Now, I'm not there today, but I think if you think about all the sophistication that can happen, where, you know, when Jessica talks about putting a link on her site, you know, if the reader is in Europe, should you really be pointing them to say a Barnes and Noble?
If the, you know, the item is out of stock at that particular merchant, there's sort of a ton of sophistication that can happen around really optimizing in a way that even the most sophisticated publishers can go and certainly unsophisticated publishers really can't do.
And so, you know, and from the advertiser side, there's possibilities like link insertion, right? Sure, you could have a human being go through your text and carefully find every single place that could be linked out to an advertiser.
But are you really going to pick the right ones, AB, test them, figure out which ones convert the best knowing that the conversion rates change over time, knowing that the conversion rates are different for different geographies.
That level of sophistication is out of the range of even the most sophisticated publisher and frankly, you know, well out of the range of the small ones.
And so I think that, you know, that is what we seek to enable in publishers.
So my advice to a publisher would, I would say, look, if you have three or four or five merchants that you already work with well, you may, you know, maybe it's one of them, look to a company like Viglink to manage the rest, right?
We're happy to start as backfill. It's complete upside to you. These are merchants that you haven't had found time to pay attention to yet anyway.
My belief is that over time you're going to let us manage more and more of your inventory. But, you know, let's find out.
And, you know, just to build off that. So, you know, Jessica mentioned that she's, she's got Viglink active in different areas of her website.
If I'm not working with Viglink, if I just assume that, you know, we have this amazing relationship with Jessica, I'm getting all this great exposure, I'm still missing out, right?
There's still opportunity in these areas that are secondary tertiary areas for Jessica. And it's something that I still want to be there.
And I guess, you know, all I mentioned earlier, eBay is in kind of a unique situation where we are our own network.
We're representing thousands and thousands of eBay sellers. But we're still kind of merchant, not really what we are.
And it's, you start getting these positions of, well, do I want to partner with another network? What was the value in that? Why would I do that? That's my competitor.
And really kind of challenging that status quo of, you know, who can be a partner in why and start really thinking more deeply around what is the value I can get?
And instead of just blowing it off, you know, sitting down and spending some time about what are the opportunities? And how can I make more money?
Even if it's a small opportunity, right? Like, everybody be thrilled to grow their business and they're 5-10%.
I would take that all day long. So I would definitely keep your mind open as far as who you should be working with and why.
Oliver, where do you think the industry is headed? Where are some of the big trends and themes of how affiliate is going to evolve over the next few years?
Sure. I think that, you know, what human publishers are uniquely good at at this point is creating content, right? There are no machines, you know, as of today that can create content as compelling as great writers.
In contrast, though, the, you know, spreadsheet work of measuring conversion rates, AB testing, rolling them out, parting your traffic, human beings are not very good at that. And it's certainly not fun.
And so I think you're going to see an increasing trend towards automation as you've seen in the display industry, right?
Display started, you know, Budweiser would buy out a whole site ESPN and they sort of hardwired in the Budweiser creative and for a month you see all Budweiser ads on ESPN.
That obviously moved to ad servers and that ultimately moved to the DSPs.
I think you're seeing the same thing in affiliate marketing. The days of hand, you know, logging into a network, finding a product you want to promote, copying the link and pasting it into your document, and then that's it.
I think those days are winding down. I think treating links as ad inventory that's managed in a sophisticated way, like DSPs do for display, that is the future.
You know, obviously we hope to be a big part of that future, but I think, you know, with or without big link, that is the trend.
The automation software delivered optimization, that's where the industry is going.
Jessica, do you think that a CPA model and the affiliate revenue generator for ZIF Davis, is that going to become more prominent versus, you know, display in CPC or how do you think it's going to shift for you and other publishers moving forward?
I mean, it's grown for us. So our commerce group really started about three years ago.
Without revealing numbers, I mean, we're on a, you know, the first couple years enormous growth.
Growing every year, it's become a much more important piece of the business and a much more kind of focused part of the business than I think they even initially thought about.
Certainly, CPA is much more important to us than CPC was or than CPC is and that's different than I, you know, I'd have a different conversation with you if it were two years ago.
So it's becoming much more important piece of the business and, you know, I think, you know, we're talking about automation, that's really how we run our commerce business.
It's much more out of a database and where we're continually optimizing for revenue, but it's much more important part.
John, do you have any kind of big picture trends or your thoughts that you want to share about where the industry is going to go over the next few years?
No. Not really. You know, as I mentioned, I've been in this space for a while and I think what's really amazing about it is as you don't know and every couple of years something comes up and it's impactful.
And the question is how quickly can you get your arms around it? And when I think of social or mobile is actually even better, right?
Like, we've been talking about mobile for five, ten years. And every year this is the year of mobile and then suddenly you kind of hit this tipping point and people start looking at their traffic and they're like, you know, ship, you know, half my traffic's mobile.
It happens. And now what do I do about it? And I love the fact that we're mostly still trying to figure out what to do about it, right?
And we all saw it coming and it's happening. And I still sit in meetings and people are trying to figure out what to do about it, right?
These are the problems that we're all trying to solve. And there's going to be another problem that's going to come up in the next couple of years.
And I think the challenge of a company like eBay is one, how do we stay flexible enough so that when you spot a trend like that or you see something in the data that you're able to make a case for how you deal with it?
And eBay is a big company that's been around for a long time and it's like steering a big ship, right? And it's not easy.
So we try to be flexible and try to come to events like this and talk to partners and sometimes things that sounded silly a couple of years ago are, I never would have thought we'd be seeing the kind of business we see through a channel like Twitter, right?
Like, who the hell is going to buy stuff off at Twitter? But they do. It's amazing.
So Oliver, John brought up mobile. What are your thoughts about mobile? Do you see that as being a big part of the things future or any thoughts that you want to share about mobile apps and mobile web driving transactions moving forward?
Sure, absolutely. If you don't mind, I'm just going to step back to one thing you said a second ago, the whole CPA CPC debate. From my perspective, it's totally red herring. Like, it doesn't matter.
I don't think affiliate is CPA, which is something different from CPC. In our mind, they're the same. You can back CPA out to CPC. It's a question of risk assumption.
And even within the context of John and my relationship, it started out as CPC now with CPA. I think don't get caught up in, you know, is it CPA or CPC?
I think at the end of the day what a publisher cares about is money, optimize around money. And I think CPA and CPC, you can go either way for good reasons.
The question on mobile, about 35% of Vigilings traffic is mobile and growing quickly. It's less than 35% of our revenue, but the rate is improving.
Definitely something that we saw when we looked at the data last year that surprised us a little bit is, I expected we broke out conversion rates by mobile per platform.
And I expected that essentially all advertisers would have a worse conversion rate on mobile, but you know, some less worse than others. That is not the case at all.
I think iTunes is the sort of obvious counter example. iTunes converts much, much better on mobile than it does on desktop. You may think, okay, well, yeah, that's a give me, but who else?
There's really a full spectrum of many merchants who actually convert better on mobile than on web. And it's really just a question of doing the work to make it a mobile friendly experience.
To get the tracking right, obviously conversions are hard to measure if the tracking is not right. And certainly deep linking where you can click on a link and experience and land, not just on the app for the advertiser, but at the right item on that advertiser, just like you do on the web.
We find that when all those three pieces are in place, you know, mobile has the opportunity to convert as well or better.
Then desktop certainly the sort of opportunity for impulse purchases, you know, like iTunes, you know, does much better on mobile than on the web.
It'll be interesting to see really high value items are people really going to buy a house on mobile. Maybe, you know, I certainly wouldn't laugh at it.
And so, you know, I do believe that over time effectively all the traffic will be mobile. And so it really needs to be something that we stay focused on.
Also, multi-screen is probably a good important sub sort of class of that where someone browses on mobile and converts on the web or vice versa or separate, you know, between their iPad and their phone tracking that is obviously a huge challenge, but is an increasing modality the way buyers buy today.
Somebody bought a million dollar car on eBay last year.
Sorry, I'm on mobile, yes.
Jessica, would you mind sharing your perspective on mobile as well and where you see publishers role evolving?
Well, I don't know how much more I have to add. Obviously mobile is important. We're seeing on some of our sites easily over 50% is mobile traffic.
I think from our perspective, we've had some trouble always integrating the advertisers just because of the way the feeds work, the way our database works, the way attribution is.
And that's a problem that needs to be resolved. And from the publisher side, from our side, we haven't done that great of a job, frankly, with our mobile experience.
We're a little behind and I think that some of it is because we want the revenue to be there. It's sort of the way we kind of operate.
And it hasn't been there. Certain sites are going to perform better than others on mobile.
Jerry's still out. There's an internal debate on whether someone wants to read a full review of a Dell computer and really do a lot of investigation on their phone versus on the computer and where that action is taking place.
But I'm part of the 2015 plan is certainly growing mobile and getting that together, which we've, in fairness, we've not done a great job with.
One thing I wanted to add though in terms of direction is, and I don't want to open up a huge kind of worms that I'm going to have trouble addressing, but I think that attribution is going to be important for advertisers, frankly.
And then as a result, publishers, where is this click really coming from? And what's the value of that user for the advertiser?
That's certainly something that is a publisher with a variety of different kinds of sites that we run into.
John, what do you think the network perspective on the issues that Jessica brings up with the attribution on mobile? What's your perspective and how does a network like EPN addresses?
She did open the can of worms. She did. And Oliver and I talked about it yesterday, which is why he's laughing, barely able to contain himself.
It's not easy, right? So, and actually the conversation we had almost verbatim was the technology is there for multi-device attribution to try to figure out which cookies are associated with which users are associated with which device and try to bring all the data together
and make sense of it. The challenge is that one is not that easy.
Two, especially in a large company, you've got lots of different groups and individuals that own lots of different parts of this and getting it all to fit together is very challenging.
From somebody who is responsible for driving affiliate revenue, I absolutely want to attribute every transaction I can to my channel.
It is in my best interest to figure out how to make that work, but it's just not very cut and dry.
And I think there's some organizations, Apple is a great example, right?
Every time you want to do something, every time you want to breathe with Apple, you have to authenticate or Google or Facebook or somebody else.
You know, they know everything you're doing and it's very easy to connect every time you've engaged with their brand together.
In other instances, it's not. And especially if there is a click and we continue to base attribution on a click to a site, not off of another action beyond that.
So, like on eBay, there's all kinds of actions you can take. You can watch an item, you can bid on an item.
There's lots of signals that we can see that you're actually really interested rather than you just clicked to the site.
But if I was to go to Oliver and say, I'm not going to pay you for clicks anymore, there has to be something else that happens.
It wouldn't be very happy, right? These are industry standards.
So, I think part of it is, if you want to be a trend set or in front of everybody, you want to take that risk.
And I haven't seen anybody willing to take that risk yet. And I don't think it's going to be me.
Oliver, do you have anything to add?
Yeah, I think, and we did have almost exactly that stuff yesterday, you know, I think you imagine the sort of perfect data world.
You can spot every click on the way to a conversion. And, you know, every site or not every site.
It's certainly like my network is one that believes, man, you know, a lot, we get a lot of clicks, but we don't get credit for the conversion because
you know, someone at the last minute goes to retail me not or something. And so, you know, they get credit for the sale and not us.
Turns out it's not as kind and dry than that. You know, sometimes the conversion is measured at yes, I want to purchase rather than, you know, entering the coupon code.
But nonetheless, I think a number of parties believe if we could just measure, you know, all those clicks where I influence the sale but don't close it, I would earn a lot more money.
I talk about that as redistributing the pie amongst the affiliates. So sure, you know, maybe I could claim a little pie back from, you know, a retail me not or something.
I think, to me, a much more interesting avenue of pursuit is growing the pie for everyone. And I think that is things like multi-device attribution.
I think if I could take my pick between, you know, measuring, hey, I was responsible three clicks up from a sale and so I should get, you know, 5% of that sale or of that commission versus, hey, here's sales that have been happening all along and we just haven't been tracking them properly because they happen on multi-devices, I take the latter every day.
And I don't, as long as I've been in this industry, there's been talk of, you know, getting credit for clicks other than the last click, it shows no sign of coming any closer to reality as far as I can see.
So I do not see that coming any time soon.
So getting, let's go back to traffic quality for a moment. Oliver, you mentioned, you know, hundreds of thousands of publishers, you know, would you be willing to share an instance of maybe an issue that came up that affected your network and maybe, you know, EPN as well and kind of how you and John or your teams kind of worked through that, you know, to solve a problem.
The one that pops to mind is actually a non EPN example, which maybe is for the best. You know, we had an incident probably two years ago now where an Indonesia and why it's Indonesia, I don't know, but that's where it was.
And a number of what I would call low quality blog sites popped up, you know, with sort of thin low quality content pointing to, you know, a major merchant.
And, you know, these sites SEOed reasonably well, at least on sort of fringe terms. And so people would, you know, click through from Google search results to these content sites onto the merchant and make a purchase.
And, you know, we got a bunch of revenue credit for that. The advertiser, you know, basically said, we don't like this traffic and we're not willing to pay for it.
In fact, you know, we want it to kick off a whole sort of examination of every publisher in your network and it was sort of hugely painful.
I think the thought experiment remains like, okay, I got it that, you know, you don't want to pay for this traffic. So it would be okay if we sent it to someone else then.
You know, I think that that would have been an interesting conversation that we did not have the technology at the time to have.
But that is a good example where basically the merchant got to say, we just don't want this traffic and we don't want to pay for it.
The truth is they're still getting the traffic. They're just not paying for it. You know, and I don't think that's really the right thing in the long run.
I think despite it not being sort of high quality engaging content, it was sort of certainly engaging enough to draw Google, to draw users who actually click through and really bought things.
And so, you know, that the approach we took was to kick all those people out of our network and, you know, they are on their own.
But I think over time, I do think those publishers should have the ability to say, hey, you know, if that merchant won't pay for it, maybe there's another one who will.
Because I do think there's a clearing price for that traffic, even if it's not as high a price as, you know, some, you know, side the Jessica runs.
And I think that is a great example of how the market should work when, you know, sort of the agency works in both directions.
John, what did you mind sharing, I guess, EPN's perspective on this traffic quality or when issues come up, how you guys work through them, either directly with publishers or with networks like thing like.
Yep. So, it's network quality for eBay is huge. And some people in the room might know, eBay worked with a major affiliate network years and years ago.
And there was a lot of fraud, frankly, coming through the program, in particular a couple of individuals who are in jail right now.
Took eBay for literally millions of dollars of commissions. And so, when eBay brought the affiliate network in-house and built the platform,
it was, it was built like a fortress and we invested a lot in the network quality.
So today, we have individuals, that's all they do. They're on staff, we work with third parties, including, including your firm and several others.
Because we don't know everything because there's stuff that's changing all the time.
And, I mean, somebody mentioned earlier, I mean, there's patterns that that existed since the dawn of affiliate marketing that you can, you can track.
And there's stuff that we, frankly, don't know yet. And when I think about, we talked about mobile earlier.
You know, mobile apps is one of those things that, again, for a year or two now, we keep seeing, you know, our mobile apps, the future.
And should we be really aggressively pursuing mobile apps? Anybody created a mobile app? There's gazillion mobile apps out there.
Why aren't we doing that? And the first question that we had was, well, do we know how it works?
Do we know how you can actually cheat using a mobile app? Is it possible?
And actually, working with Vigilink, we actually said, hey, can you stop sending us mobile app traffic while we kind of figure this out?
And Oliver hung his head and said, yes, we can do that. We don't like doing that. But okay.
And so we spent some time, again, working with not just our own team, but just trying to find subject matter experts that can go through and figure out, you know, how, how is it possible to defraud?
Somebody threw a mobile app. And then once you kind of figure out what you think the realm of possibility is and what your risk is, you can kind of inch back into it.
And again, having a party like Vigilink there, we want to make sure that, at the very least, they understand what we're looking for.
And then we can kind of inch back into it. But it's, you know, there's always going to be a new frontier.
And it might take some time before everybody's comfortable with how you approach it, even if it seems like a massive opportunity.
Do you mind if I just jump back in quickly? I think this is a great sort of illumination of the tension, the potential tension, right?
In the sense that an advertiser, and eBay, certainly not the only one, is entitled to say, you know, hey, I'd really rather not pay for X. You know, it's not what I want.
So I don't want to pay for it. But certainly, I think it should be in the publisher's wheelhouse to say, okay, that's fine.
But then you're not going to get it for free, right? And I think that that is what sets the true, you know, sort of market clearing price of traffic.
Right? As long as an advertiser feels, I can refuse to pay for this, and I'm going to get it anyway for free, then of course they're not going to pay for it.
Right? I think we need to create a market system where an advertiser who says, I don't want to pay for X, that's fine, but then they don't get it.
It goes to their competitor, right? And I think an individual publisher trying to behave that way, maybe the zips of the world can do that.
But certainly the small publishers, maybe in this room, have no ability to do that. Right? If you say to an advertiser, you know, if you stop paying me, I'll send it somewhere else.
I think individually the advertiser is going to say, fine, I really don't care. But collectively, right? If you do have hundreds of thousands of publishers and millions of domains, collectively those publishers speaking together can say, we have a lot of traffic coming from these mobile apps.
And if you don't want to pay for it, I totally understand, but you are not going to get it. It's going to your competitor. And that's how the price rises, and that is an issue of fairness for the publisher as far as I'm concerned.
And this is a real motivation for the existence of Big Link.
Interesting perspective. Jessica, do you have any comments that you want to add on this topic?
I mean, from my perspective, it's a little bit different. I was going to say, would there have been times where public advertisers may not have wanted to pay what we expected or may not have wanted to pay for something.
And we said, all right, we're not going to promote you. But again, we have sort of that luxury to take a little bit of maybe short-term pain in terms of, you know, if we wanted to negotiate a better rate or maybe position partners against each other.
The one thing which I think I alluded to actually earlier in the panel is that from a publisher perspective, there's advertiser quality.
So it's, you know, you don't have to take every advertiser or merchant who goes knocking on your door. They're plenty, you know, being that I've got it, you know, we have a deal site that we run in addition to the premium content sites who are emailing, calling, post this deal, post this deal, post this deal.
Some with, you know, incredible commission where you look at it and go, oh my god, you know, I've already calculating the dollars.
But you take a little look at them and you do a few minutes of research, not even 10, and you realize, well, they had a bait and switch problem six months ago.
You know, they've got a lot of customer complaints and you know, something posting them damages our credibility and all you really have as a publisher is your credibility.
You know, if we start posting really bad deals or great reviews on bad products, no one's going to come to us anymore. We're out of business.
So as a publisher, you've got some decisions, you know, don't be at the mercy of the advertisers. You can make some decisions and have some power on who you want to promote and who you want in your program.
Excellent. So at this time, we are going to open it up to questions. If anybody has a question, there's a microphone here that can address one water all of the panelists.
No questions? Come on, guys.
I used to work. I spent a lot of time working as a reporter. And so my area of expertise is getting to get to becoming an expert in something I have no idea that's really boring.
So when there are certain companies that have niches and they can't bring in people, they can't get the conversation started.
What is the best way to identify the niches that are hard to get?
Just to repeat the question, gentlemen in the front row asked, what are the best ways to identify the niches that are hardest to get?
Does anybody on the panel want to take this one?
Can you clarify what?
Sure. Okay. So, right, how do you get in front of a niche vertical that maybe doesn't, it's not maybe tablets.
Everyone wants, but it's like some kind of, I'm going to give you a bad example because there's plenty of search on it.
Antivirus software for small businesses with under, you know, whatever it is.
So, I mean, from our perspective as a publisher, I'm not very tech, I'm going to garble this a little bit, but we do a lot of research in terms of SEO, in terms of Google search.
So, we start to look at where we think there's potential in terms of searches and where we think we back into a revenue number associated with that.
And then we write content that we think will do well eventually in organic search, even if it's on the long tail.
But this is sort of a strategy for any small blog. You kind of figure out what your niche is.
You do the research, you have to sort of reverse engineer it at times, and then you start to rank on the term.
And if you start to get to number one or two, and you've got product where maybe they're, you know, you sell a few, and it's a good payout, then you start to generate revenue.
And it's really sort of finding that, and then finding who that competition is, who's ranking, you know, above you, and understanding what they're doing.
I don't know if this directly addresses your question, but, you know, eBay has a lot of data. And I think historically we haven't done a very good job of doing stuff with that data.
And big focus for the company, the back half of last year, but going into this year in particular is, is how do we surface that information up?
So people understand trends of what people are looking for, what people are buying.
So particularly around niches, how do we create a spot on the site that you can go find out what people are looking at?
And that might have a shelf life of a couple days, it might have a shelf life of a couple weeks, and maybe it's the start of something that's going to be going on for a few years.
But we need to do a better job of helping our publishers and people who want to be publishers find out, because it's an opportunity to build a site and go through that whole process that Jessica was just talking about.
You know, this is sort of an old problem, right? Like, how do I identify a region that, you know, has some opportunity, but no one else has exploited yet?
There's no super easy answer. I think certainly, as John said, having access to a lot of data helps.
So, you know, for an individual publisher combing your search logs and understanding what queries are landing on your landing people on your site that maybe you didn't realize.
Google has gotten a lot tighter with that data in recent years, but, you know, there's still ways to get the stuff out of it.
The, you know, we look for things like, I mean, a great example is our dashboard lets publishers know which specific items have been sold as a result of traffic off their site.
And so we've definitely had publishers say, man, I thought I was an electronic site, but turns out I'm also an AV site, because when I go look at the merchandise we've sold, there's all these, like, stereo amplifiers.
And I think that is, in fact, you know, our dashboard is useful beyond just the money to help you really understand your own audience.
You know, I send clicks to lots of merchants, but this one particular merchant converts really well. It must sort of resonate with my audience. Maybe I'm going to, you know, talk a lot more about it.
And I mean, a weird association, Tom's Hardware, who's like a well-known forum, Hardware forum site, they just have a community that's super engaged around New Egg.
For reasons like, I don't necessarily understand the conversion rate for New Egg on Tom's Hardware is higher than it is across the rest of our network.
Why exactly that is? I don't know. I think it's sort of a social thing. Like, everybody posts eggs links to New Egg on this forum. Like, I guess I will too.
And so just observing hotspots in the data, you know, is a way to short circuit that, but it is a mysterious process.
I mean, one of my favorite publishers we have is a site called Badger and Blade, which is a forum about shaving, men's shaving.
And, you know, I can't imagine that's a massive, you know, worldwide audience, but man, they're pretty engaged and they do a lot of purchasing of shaving products off that site.
Any other questions? Okay, I have a question. Jessica.
Oh, God. Yeah.
So if I'm a publisher, should I work with vague, correct? You know, what, what do I do?
I think you work with both. You know, I don't see any downside. You know, I like working, and I guess we could get into a heated conversation, but I don't know if we should.
I think you work with both. You work with directly when you can, or when it's beneficial to you, you work with vague, when you can't work direct, when it's beneficial.
They're able to, you know, you guys are able to command higher rates. At the end of the day, you have to make your revenue number or support yourself or whatever it is that you're doing, and it becomes a business decision on how you want to move forward.
I mean, I think, you know, much like selling your house, if you are a sophisticated enough seller that you don't believe you need an agent, then by all means, you know, work without an agent.
If you feel that you could be helped by representation, you know, despite the fact that that representative, you know, charges a commission, you know, then use one.
And I think, you know, there is a hybrid situation where you work directly with certain merchants that you're comfortable with and indirectly with the bulk.
I don't think there's any publisher who's sophisticated enough to work with the 30,000 advertisers, you know, as deeply as their favorite.
You know, we have about 30, just over 30,000 advertisers through our network. There's no publisher who has deep relationships with 30,000 advertisers.
So I think, you know, if you're confident you can merchandise, you can have that relationship, you can get a fair price, you can do the right things, then, you know, by all means, do it.
If you think you could use some assistance, perhaps we can be of assistance, you know, perhaps not.
But, you know, we certainly love the opportunity to find out.
And I would love everybody to work directly with me all the time.
But I mean, that's not realistic, right? And at the end of the day, I want e-bay links everywhere, everywhere that they can be.
And so I need to find a way to do that and recognize that whether it's because people don't want to integrate with 30,000 places or even five places.
Whatever the reason is, it happens and everybody's got their own needs and needs to make their own choices. So we make it work.
So, thematically, for creating successful partnerships, we've talked about transparency, trust, communication.
What are some of the other, you know, themes or kind of walk away, you know, things that people should think about in terms of how to create successful partnerships?
Well, you just named them all.
But, seriously, it's, I think that's really it. It's being very, very upfront about what each party wants to get out of it.
And, yeah, I recognize that I may pay all of our premium. And I have to feel confident that I'm getting something back from that.
And he has to understand what my possible objections are and the things that are going to trigger me.
The last thing that I want is, and that he wants is, you know, six months a year down the road, and I come back to him and say,
all over like, what's going on with this? And we didn't talk about it. I didn't tell him that this was a concern upfront.
He didn't make any preparations to how to deal with this day when this day inevitably came.
We didn't put enough thought into what could happen down the road. So I think it's planning and it's transparency, right?
We've got to be really upfront about what each party wants.
I think that's a great answer.
Just to the somewhat rhetorical story, a moment ago, when John said, hey, I'd like to everyone to link to me all the time, whatever.
There's actually an easy way to do that, right? Just pay a dollar, click, all the time, keep it up forever.
And that will happen, right? If you did that and you kept it up forever, you'd find every publisher in the world linking to you.
They'd be ripping out other links to other merchants and pointing to you.
So the truth is that's not all an advertiser wants. They need an ROI, right? They need to believe the dollars spent, you know,
resulting in criminal revenue in a way that's sensible. And I think that's what makes this, you know, a market and a sophisticated market, a subtle market.
It's not just about, you know, linked to me over them. It's about, I need to be spending my corporate dollars, you know, insanely.
And so I have some threshold. And I think that being the case, all publishers and advertisers are best off if there's a competitive liquid market, you know,
we're prices fluctuate over time, like other markets, like the real estate market. And, you know, we are doing our part to enable that. And, you know, we're pretty happy.
But certainly it must exist in a context of trust. Without trust, the market participants can't participate the market fails and we sort of go back to the old world.
Jessica, any final thoughts?
I mean, I really don't have much to add to this, except to agree with, you know, all of our really is, I think, from the advertiser perspective and the publisher perspective about the return, what's your ROI.
And I think from a publisher perspective, we sometimes are too quick to maybe grab the money or look to do that. And really a better partnership is one where both, you know, parties are able to sit down, talk, email whatever it is and understand what the goals are.
So as an advertiser, what are your goals? What are you looking to do? Sometimes it's about moving products. Sometimes it's about just driving clicks and getting attention to a store.
Sometimes it's about, you know, something else in a different way of integrating. And I think it's important for both parties to understand each other a little bit. And that's how you develop a more long term partnership.
All right. Well, that concludes the session. Thank you, everyone, for coming. And yeah, enjoy the rest of the show.
Thank you.