Jellyfish is a new entrant into the comparison shopping space, but one which comes with a twist. Like other comparison services (Shopping.com et al.) Jellyfish allows you to search for a variety of consumer goods and gives you a list of affiliated ecommerce sites selling the items. Like the other comparison services, Jellyfish gets a cut of the profit from the advertising sites.
Unlike other comparison shopping sites, Jellyfish shares the profit with you the user.
When you search for an item, Jellyfish returns a list of results and prices. Advertisers who work with the service place bids on the percentage of the sale they are willing to return to the customer. The higher the percentage, the better the advertiser's ranking. Jellyfish calculates this percentage in the search results, letting you compare the actual price you would pay for the item.
The site has a fairly nice AJAX-y user interface. The actual search mechanism is a little clunky and limited for my tastes, something the Jellyfish folk will have to fix if they want their site to really take off as a consumer destination. The cash-back service is also limited to residents of the United States (or people who have a handy address there). Whether or not this will be expanded outside American borders in the future is yet to be seen.
But despite the shortcomings, Jellyfish may signal a change in the way internet marketing is carried out.
The company is part of a wave of recent sites looking to push a Cost Per Action (CPA) model for online marketing. Unlike the Cost Per Click (CPC) model which drives the majority of text-based ads and search engine placements, CPA is based on actual money changing hands and is therefore a much-preferred option for both advertiser and publisher. It also requires much better targeting of the consumer audience, which serves us all.
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