Two years ago, publisher Ziff-Davis moved its successful Computer Shopper magazine into the next natural phase of its evolution-a Web site. No one has to worry about natural selection here: Over the past 24 months, NetBuyer has become one of the fastest growing online services for marketing computer products.
NetBuyer has signed up more than 120 computer-related companies that list about 1,000 products on the site every month. The site (www.zdnet.com/netbuyer) doesn’t sell merchandise itself; visitors are linked to vendors’ sites, which may have e-commerce capabilities. Vendors pull in an average of $24 million per month in orders through the site-and that doesn’t begin to include the revenue generated for NetBuyer by banners and other types of advertising on the site, says Al DiGuido, executive vice president of both NetBuyer and Computer Shopper.
Part of NetBuyer’s revenue comes from click-throughs to the sites of specific vendors running additional separate advertising. At deadline, NetBuyer was recording 60,000 click-throughs a month, says DiGuido. These are generated from ad placements including banners, spotlights and home-page tickers, which generally cost between $5,000 and $50,000 a month. Revenue generated by these companies for NetBuyer has grown 351% from 1997 to 1998, according to promotions manager Erica Seidman.
NetBuyer, part of Ziff-Davis’ larger ZDNet Web site, is billed as a comprehensive online computer shopping mall. Vendor fees range from $2,500 to $4,000 per month depending on the number of products they have listed.
Computer Shopper, the weekly print magazine that spawned NetBuyer, is sold mostly on newsstands. It lists and reviews computer products that are sold via direct marketing. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Computer Shopper was widely believed to have helped many then-smaller computer DMers, such as Gateway, establish themselves. Much of Computer Shopper’s strength comes from reviewing and testing new computer products through its laboratories, an idea adapted from Stereo Review, a magazine Ziff sold off in the 1980s to concentrate on computer publications.
NetBuyer has remained true to this tradition, offering such services as product reviews, editorial columns and even price comparisons in specific categories. For example, last month the site featured an article on evaluating the wisdom of buying personal computers for less than $1,000. Another feature is Wizard, a tool that helps less-than-expert users decide what to purchase.
For its vendors NetBuyer has tried to distinguish itself by offering consulting services on Web ad creative and other aspects of direct marketing.
“They definitely take the information we track as indicative of what’s happening on the Web and then mirror some of the same information on their own sites,” says DiGuido. “If they notice that they’re getting a tremendous amount of traffic in one product category they’ll definitely use that information to spotlight the product on their own sites, because they know if a buyer comes into an aggregated site [like NetBuyer] he may come to them directly.”
NetBuyer end users, says DiGuido, cover the whole spectrum of customers-from small to midsized businesses, large corporations and information technology concerns. Predictably, a small but growing number are now buying products advertised on NetBuyer via electronic commerce, although this does not immediately spell any changes in how NetBuyer conducts its business. “The number of orders taken via e-commerce has grown from 2% or 3% last year to 13% to 14% now,” says Seidman.
NetBuyer mostly promotes itself through direct response space ads and supplements in Ziff-Davis magazines, other parts of the ZDNet site and on selected Internet search engines.
“We don’t spend a heck of a lot of money because we don’t want to attract people who aren’t ready to buy,” says DiGuido.
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