“I think the question: ‘What are you going to DO for me?’ is not so unreasonable (to ask outsourced search optmization practitioners). 

For many years retailers were told: ‘We can’t show you, because it’s like a treasure map, once you’ve seen it, you won’t pay.’ That’s fine, the problem is the treasure map you bought five years ago looks an awful lot like the ones for sale now.

The best practices in SEO web page design are well known, so why not simply have your web designers follow these well established principles?  If the issue is execution, does it really cost the rates Sara quoted — $25K per month is $300K per year — to do the work??? Seems like a big chunk of change to me.”

George Michie

When it comes to success on the Web, there’s nothing like simplicity.  Yet the list of successful companies (let’s start with Google’s front page triumph over Yahoo!) that have leveraged this into serious cash is a short one.  Today, I’m officially adding Turn.com to my list of companies to watch and I’m not alone.  Why? 

1) Scale: they’re focused on it.

2) Blends: their model leverages multiple existing/proven ad models (behavioral targeting, user profiling, etc.)

3) Choice: offering it to advertisers (cost-per-action, cost-per-click, impressions, etc.)

4) Automation: They’re “taking the decisions for placement off the advertiser’s task list” (source: Direct Magazine)

Oops… there’s that word again (scale), Valueclick (VCLK), Doubleclick and to a large degree even Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) should sit up and listen.  Not to mention, choice.

According to my new hero CEO, Jim Barnett,

“These debates and discussions about contextual advertising versus categories, or demographics versus behavioral targeting—they’re really nonsensical.  The answer is that they all make sense. But they have to be blended together.

Successful ad networks of the future are going to apply very high-end technology to synthesize these targeted approaches, weight them for every single ad call, and then select the right ad for that particular user on that page at that time of day in that geography.”

But what are other analysts suggesting, asking?  Says Sam Harrelson of CostPerNews.com (in November ‘06),

“Continued automation of the space at the higher levels doesn’t bode well for the plethora of CPA networks paying for booths and parties at this year’s ad:tech NYC right now.  How will this affect CJ or Linkshare or Azoogle or AdDrive or VendareNetBlue in the near or long term future?”

In June of this year Larry Page said,

“I know there’s a lot of talk about the CPA, or paying per purchase.  One of the issues with that is people look around a lot before they buy something.  So it’s probably not the only information you want to look at when you’re paying for advertising. 

But we’re also excited about using more data like that in our models.”

Data?  What data?  Clickprints?

When No Means Yes
Google has twice (here and here) told publishers themselves (although a select few) it IS experimenting with rolling out a cost per acquisition (CPA) advertising model for its customers; it even invited a number of them, and publishers, to jump in and try it out.  Yet Google continues to suggest it doesn’t intend on rolling a CPA network out.  Today Google told the New York Times they have…

“... no plans to tie search results to buying habits or to use Checkout to move to a cost-per-action ad model. 

But he (Benjamin Ling, product manager for Checkout) added: ‘If there is a service that is of value to consumers, we will consider it.’”

Coming from a company that denies its display ad network exists I’m not buying it… and I don’t appear to be alone on this one.  Dave McClure saw this coming before any of us did (via Google Checkout—the company’s CPA-enabler, AdSense/AdWords shot-in-the-arm and cog in a much bigger product offering wheel aimed at small to medium sized enterprises).  In pointing at the New York Times piece, Erick Schonfeld characterizes Google’s actions as “bribing Web merchants” as he ponders the possibilities.

A $4 Billion Concentration Risk
Mix in Google’s twice being asked point blank about its CPA advertising plans and each time not answering the question and I’m convinced that Google is hedging on a CPA model in the future.  They would be foolish to not do so considering the $4 billion cost-per-click concentration risk currently powering the company to the tune of 25% of all Internet advertising spending.

During the same earnings call Page also said,

“I just wanted to add, I think there’s already starting to be a fair amount of complexity in how all the different kinds of customers we have and how they pay and which models they use and so on. I expect that that will continue, and we’ll continue to have different products for different kinds of advertisers with different ways of paying.”

Only to be followed by John Battelle’s (the hands-down authority on Google) “Google spokesman” confirmation,

“We’re always looking for new ways to provide effective and useful features to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of these efforts we are currently testing a cost per action pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to earn revenue through AdSense. We’re pleased with how the test is progressing and will continue to gather feedback from advertisers and publishers.”

Pass the Catch-up
Will Turn, Snap.com and all the others beat MSN and Yahoo! to the punch or will there be an acquisition that catapults them into position to compete with the start-ups and AllMighty Google?  One thing seems certain—Google IS, at the right time, going to move into cost-per-action advertising.  It’s a how and when question… not if.  If you look around and add it up, they’re all but confirming their intention.  Why isn’t this getting more play post-David Jackson/SeekingAlpha?

As Google (GOOG) goes up against Microsoft (MSFT) those in the digital advertising industry stand to take a brusing or become roadkill.

The future for what could be a killer app for Google—its Checkout service—continues to be underestimated and mis-understood.  This is less about Paypal and more about extending the life cycle of Google’s advertising product (the AdWords connection).  More importantly, Checkout could be one piece of a soon-to-be unveiled, soup-to-nuts ecommerce offering for small to medium enterprises (SMEs).  What would fit more nicely aside document sharing via Docs and Spreadsheets?

In examining Checkout’s potential impact, the questions we should be asking are:

1) Will enough consumers adopt Checkout and, if so, what will drive the adoption?

2) Will enough small businesses embrace Google as a more complete provider: an ISP, host, advertising and e-commerce solution provider?

Please notice the lack of focus on disrupting Paypal and on immediate-term success of Google netting merchant participants.

Arguably, Google does have an opportunity to drive adoption of what amounts to the world’s first widely used “digital wallet.” Pointing at previous wallet failures (Yahoo! and Microsoft) isn’t convincing me that the idea isn’t a good one so much as it suggests it was a premature one.  We have seen many ideas born in 1998 fail in 2001 only to be re-born again and thrive in 2005 (i.e. companies offering Web-facilitated drop-shipping and pre-fab storefront creation).  Additionally, Microsoft (and Rakuten’s Linkshare division for that matter) seems hell bent on making mobile phones the digital wallet of the future (Linkshare, of course, hoping to figure out a way to get affiliate middle-men in between consumers and the checkout point).

Driving Adoption: Privacy, Trust
So what will drive consumer adoption of a secure Web shopping wallet?  Ironically, I posit, privacy concerns.  I say ironically in that Google has, and continues to, amass THE proprietary data set ranging from corporate marketing ROI intelligence (Google Analytics + AdWords/AdSense = intimate return on investment knowledge) to user surfing behavior (via everything from Google Reader to Google accounts consumers are continually logged into).  There’s nothing private about interacting with Google or any of its sister products, services or companies but so far the company has not stumbled in terms of users/customers being overly concerned with their privacy.  They’ve not used any of this data in “evil” ways—or at least they’ve not admitted to it.  Google’s trust factor is high.

Is it far fetched to suggest that consumers would trust Google with protecting their charge card number in an age where they are already scattering it across e-commerce sites?  Not everyone gives their number out for storage by the retailer, of course, but most merchants are actively asking consumers for it.  In the end, what’s safer… storing the number in one place (Google’s server) or storing all over the place? 

Driving Adoption: Convenience
Web 2.0 is all about the consumer’s ability to customize and Google’s all over it.  Consider Google’s offering, at a centralized location, consumers a place to receive and store customized (again, only from a consumer’s favorite/approved retailers) promotions and coupons.  One need not look further than Yahoo’s new “Bargains” shopping tab to predict such a return volley from Google.  Again, I suggest the question is when and how… not if.

I posit that this is all about a longer, methodical (uncharacteristic for Google, I admit) race to capture a piece of the wider SME market—one dominated by Microsoft products and services.  Does this focus on digital wallets?  Not really and Google seems content to let Microsoft lead the masses into a more transaction-focused mobile future. 

Google could (although it denies such plans) become a full fledged ISP (Internet Service Provider) complete with site building, hosting and marketing analytics tools.  Need to drive visitors to that site?  No problem; how would you like to pay for them? (see Scaling ‘Cost Per’ Marketing below)

When and How Google Will Move
I suggest that we’ve only begun to see Google flex its branding muscle (among consumers and SME owners) and the tipping point will be reached when its advertising business revenues take a slowdown.  This is another “when not if” question and will be preceded (if not triggered) by a declining housing market and rising interest rates.  I am confident that Google will, at such a time, launch sizable TV, radio and print branding campaigns that seek to earn the trust and adoption of consumers across a wide array of its largely free offerings.

Did-It.com’s Kevin Lee seems to agree.  Says Lee,

“If I were Google I’d be thinking about how to sell something really cheap in order to get consumers to sign up. For example I’d sell a Google sweatshirt for $4.95 only with Google Checkout. Could be a huge Google logo merchandise store. Google takes a little loss on the merchandise, gets critical mass on Google Checkout and suddenly hundreds of thousands of Google logos are walking the street in the form of hats, sweatshirts, etc.”

Scaling ‘Cost Per’ Marketing
Cost per click (CPC)?  Cost per action (CPA), lead or transaction?  Not a problem—Google can handle all forms of payment that an advertiser may desire.  SME customers relying on Google Checkout as their primary means to process customer transactions (or Google Analytics as their marketing ROI tool) can take advantage of paying on a CPA basis.  It’s a snap for Google (an affiliate marketing scenario is all but built into Checkout using simple, industry standard pixel tracking).  Listen up Valueclick, shopping comparison engines and anyone else wishing to sell CPA and CPC visitors to advertisers.

According to Forrester Analyst Charlene Li,

“They (Google) already offer a few things by cost-per-action, but the problem has always been closing the loop.  Here they can actually absolutely close the loop.”

A slight tangent: Does any of this sound familiar?  How about that age-old appeal of “free branding” (in situations where the ad is shown but no site visit or transaction results) and, in the case of Google’s Checkout, free (at least partially) CPA-based advertising that is flung far and wide across the Web?  Such a scenario should catch the attention of affiliate marketing networks like Kowabunga Marketing, Shareasale, Linkshare, Performics, LinkConnector and Commission Junction who are all looking at the SME sector as growth opportunities. 

Google has been a mixed blessing for these intermediaries who have come in 3rd place in terms of capitalizing on revenue.  Winners have been Google and affiliate sites… trailed by the affiliate networks.  Some believe so-called “CPA Networks” like Azoogleads threaten to (or already have?) beat traditional affiliate networks to the punch.

As for scale… well, some have tried to scale existing, relationship-focused affiliate networks but have failed causing the industry itself to come to a realization: “it’s all about relationships” yet I, along side of advertisers, continue to ask “what kind?” In fact, we collectively seem to be answering: “discount-focused (coupon, cash-back), incentive shopping and niche community“ so long as networks like Performics, Commission Junction and Linkshare limit their advertiser customers to a “pure performance” (CPA) payment option.  These types of affiliates/publishers offer limited scale and growth for retailers.

If there’s one thing Google knows how to do and has succeeded at at an unprecedented level, it is scale and so far Yahoo! (in partnering up with a coupon affiliate so as to access coupon codes) is scaling the discount/coupon sphere—launching its own coupon portal and potentially taking traditional affiliate networks out of the “retailer relationship discussion.” Google is sure to respond but how?  Perhaps similarly.

Again, this is not about disrupting Paypal so much as it is about a wider plan of attack on a big market: the SMEs.

Recently funded, and often mistaken as a simple cash back-focused affiliate marketer, Jellyfish.com is betting on a future where advertisers shun cost-per-click (CPC) for cost-per-action (CPA) arrangements with shopping comparison sites.  The company is not alone yet is unique in its value proposition to advertisers… one using a combination of its own innovation and red-hot models borrowed from companies like Woot.com, Google (auctioning ads) and eBates.

CEO Brian Wiegand seems well-versed in the economics of online advertising.  Specifically, Wiegand and his team are keen on exploiting the weaknesses of shopping comparison businesses like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Nextag and others. 

Yet I asked Wiegand if advertisers are ready to enter a world that involves more sophisticated means to work with CPA publishers/affiliates like Jellyfish.com.  His answer was remarkably insightful and synergistic with other trends I’m seeing in the marketplace—trends which suggest dis-intermediation of traditional affiliate networks via companies like Mercent and, in fact, Jellyfish.com as they move toward maintaining direct relationships with advertisers.

Program Length: 24 minutes

Click PLAY button below to stream.

Download MP3 file here

Where is the lead generation business going?  A fast-growing start-up called LeadPoint.com is aiming to shake things up.  How?  They’re giving just about anyone who can generate a business lead the opportunity to meet up with those needing leads in a seller-buyer exchange.  Think eBay for leads and you’ve got the gist.

What’s the promise?  A better, faster soup-to-nuts experience for everyone by creating a fluid environment where high quality leads are rewarded by the market.  In fact, all levels of lead quality are settled upon by buyers.  In the end this amounts to better pricing of various kinds and quality of business leads.

Per Petterson (left) is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of LeadPoint.  Does that name sound familiar?  It should as Mr. Petterson served as senior vice president and chief technology officer of Commission Junction, a global online advertising company known as a pioneer in Web affiliate marketing. 

Marc Diana (right) is no stranger to the industry and brings business and corporate development experience from lead generation powerhouse LowerMyBills.com.  In forming LeadPoint he pioneered the patent-pending exchange platform that powers the company—allowing for the buying and selling of leads in a free market environment and, of in turn, ensuring fair-market pricing and fraud protection.  Mr. Diana is no stranger to start-ups either with years of experience in early stage investing at firms like Innovent Group and business development experience for interactive firm iXL.

Program Length: 18 minutes

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
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Announcer: The following program is brought to you by The Partner Maker, connecting affiliates and advertisers and taking the work out of affiliate marketing. To learn more, visit ThePartnerMaker.com.

Jeff Molander: Hello this is Jeff Molander and I am joined by LeadPoint.com’s Per Petterson who is chief technology officer at the company and also Marc Diana who is founder and CEO. Thanks gentlemen, for both being here and helping us understand where the world of lead generation is going. It seems as if everything related to the web is being commoditized for lack of a better word. Every time I turn around I see market places opening up, Google’s radio ads. This week a company called BidForSpots.com is running reverse auctions in the radio advertising space. Adbright just this week announced that it is auctioning off its network space. What’s going on here? Marc maybe you can speak to it first, you work with lead generation powerhouse LowerMyBills, prior founding Leadpoint. How did you end up seeing the need for a lead marketplace?

Marc Diana: Sure, thank you. Back when I was back at LowerMyBills, playing the sort of lead-gen world that we’re in, I saw a tremendous amount of inefficacy in the world of lead generation. And that true inefficiency I saw was that when you look at what’s taking place there’s a value chain. Kind of a lead value chain. At one end of a chain you have a company that’s looking to acquire a customer. At the other end you have a company that’s garnered that eyeball. And at times that eyeball can bounce through multiple companies before it lands in the hands of the company looking to acquire a customer. Now I saw that as being a tremendously inefficient process that was taking place. And I said how about if we try to connect those two dots of those companies that are doing the true heavy lifting of getting that consumer’s eyeball initially gazing at something and also converting a consumer into an actual customer. So we bought LeadPoint to market to connect those to entities through an efficient exchange, wherein those two disaggregate communities can trade data to each other, all under one roof through a self-managed data application. Enabling them to extract more value through the actual trade of the lead than the companies that can sit in the middle of converting that eyeball into a click, converting that click into a lead, taking that lead, selling that lead once, taking that lead and maybe selling it another three times. Why does there need to be fifteen companies in the middle of that exchange when there could be one hyper-efficient engine or supercomputer sitting in between those two entities doing all the work at a much more reduced rate is the opportunity I saw and had.

Per Petterson: Really you know the point is also the enablement of smaller buyers today in the world of lead-gen. It has been dominated very large companies who are set up to buy leads and their, the sales forces of the lead aggregators are not able to serve small buyers, similar to what you sell with the ad space where prior to overtures entering the pay for click model and search there was no ability for small buyers to effectively engage in the business of buying clicks.

We’re kind of revolutionizing lead-gen enabling anybody to self-serve themselves and buy the leads that they need to grow their business on a kind of self-serve platform.

Marc: And also one kind of interesting comment that you had offered was that a commodity. I f you want to look at, the leads formed through our engine are actually a commodity yes indeed but if you want to look at LeadPoint as a business, what we’ve done is you have the buyers that Per is speaking of small and large that can participate in purchasing leads. You also have the other end of the model which are media companies or publishers, companies that have traffic and that are generating leads. What very few companies had going back three, four years ago was a network of buying power lenders and the mortgage you had NextTag you had LendingTree, you had LowerMyBills. There were three lending networks out there. Those companies had a tremendous amount of operating leverage because of those networks they had assembled. What LeadPoint has done is we’ve assembled a similar if not larger network of lenders under our house, because we’re able to reach the small ones as para hit on because its a self-managed platform. And we’ve made that body of buying power be available to anyone under the roof who has garnered those eyeballs, who is generating leads. So we’re commoditized that buying network. So what are those three companies LendingTree, NextTag and LowerMyBills all they are is a network of lenders, buying power. And then a storefront, a brochure that’s converting puts based traffic into leads. So we’ve commoditized one end of their business. So now everyone out there has a network of lenders at a very efficient price point. So now everyone can go out and build there own storefronts to convert clicks into leads.

Jeff: Interesting, so you guys have probably come to market, I’ve done a little bit of research on you guys based on what I can see on the site. It looks like you’ve come to market with certain verticals first. And do you have plans to roll out. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how you are coming to market and the types of leads that you see the most demand for versus those that you will see more demand for in the future. In particular leads that would flow through this kind of a model well.

Per: Sure, I’ll field that question. As I said going to market strategy will say the consumer lending space where we fired up the mortgage product line consisting of refinance, home equity, home purchase, and debt consolidation. Did a very, very good job of injecting ourselves in a very, very competitive business. And are probably one of three top three players in that space, and making solid headway every month. Our business probably has, I don’t know, 500 to a thousand products lying on the platform in a couple of years. Our next month’s verticals are going to be auto. Obviously you’ve seen our acquisition of some of the chief talent autovital which means we are very aggressively perusing the autovital with our auto purchase and our auto finance product. Which is getting rolled out there by the end of the year. Very, very exciting, it’s a large vertical with a hundred thousand leads generated every day in the U.S. And probably two million dollars in trade value a day. It’s a very large vertical. So we are excited about getting into that. And then we are aggressively looking to expand our business-to-business leads generation platform and our product family next year. And continue to strengthen our credit services which includes debt repair and credit repair and debt settlement and a bunch of other products. And so a little bit opportunistic and we’re currently seeing where markets are trending and things. Our goal is to have a large, large and diversified set of lead products to provide to sellers that want to sell leads on our platform.

Jeff: In terms of quality of leads. Obliviously… you guys are in the business of matching up leads sellers with leads buyers. And you are probably in a position where you are going to say to me, yeah Jeff, we can provide a better quality lead. Otherwise you’re doing some dis-intermediation here perhaps. You know connecting the dots as Marc pointed out, which may reduce some cost but I’m also guessing that you are also focusing in on leads quality and I know that there hasn’t been a lot of attention historically paid to lead quality. And nowadays in the last twelve months or so, I’m talking to people who are on the buyer end who are indicating that they are really starting to focus in on that, they can’t afford to be paying for a lot of bad leads or poor quality leads. What is it about this model, and this of course reflects on the company, but what is it about the model that can help produce a better quality lead from the lead buyers perspective?

Marc: Sure I can… One key to hone in here on the beginning of that answer is that I’m not going to claim that LeadPoint has better leads. Although, to be frank, today we do. What LeadPoint is built to do is to make sure you pay of receive market rate for the quality of lead you pull out or push into the exchange. So every lead is worth something, be it 50 cents or be it 100 dollars. Our goal here at LeadPoint is to make sure that our engine understands the value of that lead as it flows through it so it’s an equitable exchange that’s taking place.

Now, that said, our go to market strategy here at LeadPoint has been to target very high quality lead sellers out of the gate so only have those premium leads flow through the engine which is something we’ve been extremely successful at doing from day one. So the LeadPoint marketplace today is an extremely high quality marketplace at a very equitable price point for both participants in that exchange.

What we’re going to begin to do in 2007 is to open up the market so that all different quality types of leads can flow through it. So that low quality leads will also flow through our exchange but you’ll pay market rate - if you want to purchase that type of lead at all. You don’t have to purchase low quality leads per se, you cannot purchase that type of lead at all.

Jeff: Interesting. So when you open that up to the low and mid quality leads what is the primary means for buyers - I’m guessing that the buyers provide some kind of feedback or a reputation ranking that they assign to the seller, much like you would see in eBay where the sellers are able to then be ranked and as a buyer you can judge the quality of their leads accordingly based on actual, real transactions. Am I right in guessing this?

Per: Yes, I think our vision is that all participants in our exchange are rating each other. So consumers are providing feedback on lead quality, buyers are providing feedback on lead quality, operators inside our business are providing very valuable feedback on lead quality and all this stuff is being used to build our algorithms to really predict the propensity to close per source, and the propensity to close per lead, which is all used in algorithms for finding and matching purposes.

Jeff: Interesting.

Per: Fraud is non-existent in our platform. You put the hammer down and you go to an activity out in exchange.

The nature of this is that some leads - email leads perform different than search leads, telemarketing leads perform different than TV leads. This different nature of how the lead’s acquired is impacted in economics. Our goal is to have the fair and efficient exchange of those leads, where every lead is priced at the right price point. And the buyers paying off leads for it - not only that but the buyer also have some level of targeting the quality to match their ability to convert.

Some buyers are set up to large volume of medium, maybe even low quality leads, that are not fraudulent leads they’re just lower quality leads. Some buyers don’t have those capabilities and they really are specializing, they may be even have their loan officers in the mortgage category call directly to the consumer and they really want very, very, very high intent, high quality leads.

So, that’s our mission.

Jeff: So if I’m a buyer of leads, and I’m looking at a company like Lowermybills as an example in the dot consolidation area, and then I’ve got a choice of an exchange type of scenario. How do I go about making the decision where to buy my leads?

Marc: Well you test… You’re not looking to buy leads, you’re looking to acquire customers. You test purchasing leads and you measure your cost of customer acquisition. Whatever the most efficient vehicle is to acquire customers is is the one you’ll continue to buy and grow within. And so what companies do is that they’ll test out a handful of sources of leads and look to then further increase their budgets with the ones that are more efficient vehicles of customer acquisition.

What LeadPoint does is within our engine itself, we’re segmenting and banding the leads based on the quality of those leads, and enabling the buyers to pay appropriate price points by those segments and bands.

So one day, our goal is that every lead flows through LeadPoint. Even Lowermybills-leads would come through a LeadPoint engine, in the future according to our vision, so that a buyer of a lead is purchasing - it could be a Lowermybill-lead, could be a Lendingtree-lead, it could be your lead, Jeff, that you generated. They don’t care - all they are looking to do is acquire a customer. If that lead is appropriately priced for both parties everyone is going to be happy in the end, and that’s what our engine is designed to do.

Jeff: Hmm. So how do you guys compare to a company like, or I should say a startup like Root Exchange? Are you finding that there are other companies moving in this direction as well to capitalize on this opportunity?

Marc: Yeah, I mean there are. I know the CEO of Root Exchange, or I think he might just have left the company actually, but I know the guys at RootExchange fairly well, they… LeadPoint’s got over a year lead on anyone who is looking to duplicate our model and it’s very complimentary when companies do attempt to duplicate our model.

However, there’s a lot of experience under the roof here. As you pointed out earlier, Per was the founder and built Commission Junction from the ground up, and myself I was one of the early operators in Lowermybills.com. That joint 10+ years of operating experience with technology and businesses within the lead gen world is invaluable and unparalleled. So when LeadPoint came to market two and half years ago we came to market with a bulls eye. I mean literally the arrow was right in the middle of the target.

So we haven’t had to waste any time going through changes to our business model, rewriting code, trying to understand our customers needs - we knew exactly what they needed, exactly what they wanted, we built it and brought it to the market.

Other companies that are trying to duplicate our model, such as Root Exchange, are finding it to be a little painful to bring their product to the market, because they haven’t hit the bulls eye. Therefore customers are finding it difficult to use their systems, difficult to extract value from their systems, and therefore they are finding it, being part of an early stage company, difficult to generate revenue and difficult to stay in business.

Jeff: Interesting. There is obviously a lot of history there in terms of understanding the industry from multiple forms of operations I suppose, from the lead business, the affiliate marketing business which is essentially the same thing as the lead business, but also from the ability to scale a solution as well which is something that Commission Junction obviously has been able to do very well.

I appreciate you guys taking the time out of your day to help educate us on the company and a little bit on looking at the future of lead generation. I hope you might be able to do it again sometime.

Marc: Perfect, Jeff. We’re looking forward to chatting again. Next time you ought to pick us up - if you have an offline discussion, or you could have, we have a very large voice initiative that’s on the way here at LeadPoint that we’d love to fill you in at a future date at your convenience.

Jeff: Wow, absolutely fascinating, I had no idea that you guys were… I mean that’s more in the future, is what you’re saying?

Marc: That has been brought to market.

Jeff: Oh, it has?

Marc: There are phone calls being traded right now on our platform.

Per: This is an immense business opportunity for a lot of people out there and I think it’s going to be even bigger than affiliate marketing as being the cottage industry of people out there that are finding innovative ways to generate phone calls. Ideally integrating online-offline, so there’s phone numbers and there’s microsites, potentially hosted by us so people don’t have to do anything, driving traffic to the urls, and instead they convert it to data leads there or they’re driving people to call the phone number and so they’re converted into leads by the final buyer of the call.

So it’s an immense opportunity for people and we’re very, very excited about it. All the technology is patented and we feel very strong that it’s going to be a very large part of Leadpoint’s future.

Jeff: And you guys make your money by taking a fee per transaction, is that right?

Per: Across the board, our goal is to take small slice of every transaction and we don’t take a principal position in the trading on the platform.

Jeff: Again, I appreciate your time.

Marc: Thanks Jeff. Happy to help out whenever we can. Bye.

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