Apples to Apples and Acai to Acai
Arbitrage is driven on traffic, and cpa network revenues are for a large part driven by the successful acquisition of traffic. Sometimes, you don’t need new publishers or new advertisers. Sometimes, you need new traffic. That’s the premise of our article about new traffic instead of just new publishers. Thinking about traffic, means thinking about the ads that run on traffic, especially new sources of traffic. That means continuity, which also means fake blogs. Had you asked us at the beginning of the year whether we would still see flogs running on anything but tier four properties, we would have said no. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We wouldn’t call the flogosphere alive and well; it’s alive and a few people are doing well. The challenge is the same as that of industries such as this, ones that when architected a certain way can make money but which at their core offer limited value to the user. These are the products of impulse of limited rationalization, the epitome of over promise and under deliver. These are the products of monetization of hitting metrics first, user need second. They are a direct marketing dream, but that dream which was once open to almost any has consolidated into the hands of a few.
Looking back a year, almost to the day, what has changed is not the style of promotion but the number of players. When the industry can’t control who plays, it becomes up to the traffic sources. Who they pick is not necessarily the best of breed; it’s simply the ones they have known the longest, and often it isn’t those spending the most. So, who’s left? Three verticals – weight loss, work from home, and penny auctions. The first two especially have undergone incredible flux – the advertiser, publisher, and network landscape looks dramatically different. How they market, though, looks quite the same.
News Name – A staple of the modern flog strategy, the news like name. We still see the occasional city name plus publishing term, e.g., “LosAngeles-Gazette.com,” but not nearly as many as like “Consumer Reporter,” “News1Reports,” or “ConsumerTipsDigest,” etc.
Disclaimer on top – It looks like Advertorial has won the day; you will find some that say advertisement but it’s mostly “Advertorial” followed by wording informing that no relationship between any real news site and this one exists, e.g., “This site is not affiliated with any newspaper publication.”
Weather Feed – No good site seems to be complete with pulling in some type of weather information. The better flogs use rather accurate ip tracking to show weather for the viewer of the site’s geography. Others seem to enjoy picking a random city with meaningless weather, i.e., they use a cheap script.
Closed Fake Comments – A hallmark from day 1, comments. These are a hold over from the fake blog days, when as opposed to news looking sites, the purveyors of free trials used sites that looked like personal blogs. Comments are also found in legitimate news sites but never in the same look or feel. They also don’t say, “Comments Closed Right Now.” They might if it were a post older than a few months, but a big tip-off to the fake blog status is how they can be closed, yet almost all the comments appear to be very recent.
Picture of International Reporter – What’s a news site without an anchor / reporter picture. Poor “Julie”, aka, Melissa Theuriau, has been yo-yo dieting for the past year now. She’s certainly tired of trying acai; although doing a search or two on the real person will result in at least 15 minutes of wasted NSFW time.
Date Script – Now now now; that’s the story line here. Whether to change the date of the comments or the expiry of the trial / discount code, you’ll find an almost overuse of various time of date scripts.
Embedded Videos – In the rare case that the company has a real news clip about its service, you’ll see that one. So far, it’s been all of one fake news site that can do this. The rest continue to line the page with YouTube scoured pieces talking not about the product itself but something related to it. If it’s diet, then acai. If it’s a work from, then it’s a recession / jobs piece.
No choices – Arguably the biggest giveaway to a fake news site are all the places you can click and the singularity of the destination. They aren’t here to build a relationship; they aren’t here to truly engage. They are here to have you go to step 2. The number of links that look as though they should go somewhere else, but don’t, is borderline ingenious.
The big decisions they have to make are primarily:
Single page / article vs. full site – Some news sites present just one long article, while others make it appear that you’ve landed on a page within a more comprehensive site. Overall not a major decision, but don’t tell that to someone who likes Gala apples, not Fuji, who thinks Honeycrisp are artifically sweet and Macintosh too fluffy inside.
Real functionality – Here is a true conundrum of the fake news world, and for all direct marketing for that matter. You make money not on this site but another. The goal is to get out of the users way and/or to increase their likelihood to purchase along the way. So, how real should you make the sight? For the longest time, they avoided doing anything resembling actual functionality. If it said “share,” that meant go to the next landing page. If it said “leave feedback,” that meant go to step 2. Even leave this page means go to the transaction page. It was always choice between wanting it to look functional but not distract people from the mission of making the arbitrager money. It hasn’t changed dramatically, but there are some light touch tools that allow for re-marketing – Facebook likes and twitter feeds. By no means are we seeing major steps just steps. Want to actually make some money? – collect email.
