Aiming to beef up Live Search’s shopping and commerce component, Microsoft acquired Jellyfish.com, a comparative shopping search engine. The company describes itself as:
A new kind of search engine. We call it the Internet’s first buying engine. Search engines are great for finding information, but we think you also need a search engine that is perfect for when you want to buy something online.
What makes Jellyfish not your ordinary shopping search engine is the fact that it shares its revenues to consumers who used their engine to buy from the site which was referred by Jellyfish’s. It’s like a reward program of credit cards. Consumers are credited 50% of the revenues paid by advertisers to Jellyfish.
So, where does this sit on Microsoft’s Live Search then? I don’t think Microsoft would actually carry on with the current Jellyfish incentive program. The Live Search just needed a strong vertical search engine to power up Live Search’s shopping component. Jellyfish superb vertical search technology and its current pool of advertisers may very well serve Live Search some better purposes.
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1 response so far ↓
Jeff Molander on Oct 3, 2007 at 11:14 am
I’m reading a lot of comments such as “It’s not a game changer” (coming from analysts). This conclusion relies on things not changing much in terms of how the Web gets monetized. Even Google understands what’s coming next — a slow-down in pay-per-click ad model spending.
Proof’s in the puddin: Look no further than Google’s:
1) Launching a cost-per-action (”pay-per-action”) ad model
2) Launching a tool allowing advertisers to manage (automate placement of) pay-per-click ads against a pre-defined cost-per-action
Google understands the game is about to change and is moving. Is anyone paying attention? MSFT is and they’re locking up intellectual property in this move — one that combines multiple, successful and innovative digital shopping models.
Jellyfish takes a best of breed approach and “mashes them up” to the amusement of consumers: Ebates + Woot.com and on the advertiser-side, eBay’s Shopping.com + Google’s AdWords auction environment + Commission Junction’s (VCLK) performance-based cost model (cost-per-action) with a twist of Google (auctioning off ads).
It all ads up to valuable IP that Google, in theory, cannot access.
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