CPA Shopping Search Jellyfish Closes $5 Million Round
Marshall Kirkpatrick
20 comments »
Madison, Wisconsin shopping search engine Jellyfish.com just announced the end of a $5 million round of funding from Kegonsa Capital Partners and Clyde Street Investments. It’s been a busy week of funding announcements for 2.0 style sites. Jellyfish searches for products across more than 1000 thousand stores that provide Cost-Per-Action compensation to Jellyfish for each purchase. Jellyfish then returns “at least half” of that compensation to users. Thus search results display the base price for any given store selling an item, the CPA return percentage and thus the ultimate price for buyers. Jellyfish calls it a Value Per Action (VPA) model.
Kegonsa Capital Partners and the company’s founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire provided initial seed funding for the company earlier this year. There is no shortage of comparison shopping sites around the web, but very few of them are this interesting. Sharing affiliate revenue is nothing new (see our coverage of Kulist and FatWallet, for example) but doing it with class and getting funding is impressive.
If the site gains substantial adoption, the company hopes it can drive base prices down and commissions up. Vivek Puri’s excellent blog StartupSquad had a good explanation of the service and reported that the round was about to close two weeks ago. See also our comparative review of shopping review sites Retrievo, ViewScore and Wize.
Another re-make of a Web 1.0 concept. Back then (1998 to 2000), it was a company called Affinia…
sounds like a super great idea. it would prolly be cool if the funds could be sent to your PayPal account, but that is just an idea as I did not look much into how they actually do it.
Yup.. Another money loosing affiliate site. Nothing special about this. Do they crawl for data? or is this strictly data feed from the merchant?
Only over 1,000 merchant isn’t impressive. I know other sites have over 50,000 merchants. Anyone can go to shopping.com and request for the data feed and they even pay you for the traffic you send them. So anyone interested in setting up a shopping comparison site can do it in an hour. Just focus on your branding.
No tech department or employees to feed.
So I don’t get this one.
I’m thinking about getting into this game. It’s good money for extra beer, but I don’t see it needing $5 million.
Hmm, A little research -
These (2) founders tell us; that they have college degrees (good). Then they go on to tell us that they started a business together (name protect) .. that also got 5 Mill in funding.
- The point, These guys are professional capitol finders! - There is absolutley no reason these company would need 5 mill, Didn’t Google start with 100k ?
- Even if it turns out to work (giving away half your profit is never good) This company will prove to be “over Funded”.
- Also the page that stops you to sign up before you can shop is terrible!
If only the results were accurate … a search for a “Nikon d80″ returns a store that lists the price at $984, but go to the store to buy it and they want $1299
I searched for the book “Constitutional Law- Principles & Policies” by Chemerinsky on JellyFish and came out with this:
http://www.jellyfish.com/produ.....35/1285017
I searched for the same book on Fetchbook.info and this is what I found:
http://www.fetchbook.info/comp.....0735524289
I doubt I’ll ever use JellyFish to shop for books until they improve their search results. I don’t care if they promise to give me $0.50 or something.
I have been working on something recently that is similar to the Fat Wallets and Jellyfish’s but nowhere on such a grandscale. The site is http://www.invisiblecitizen.org and we have filed to be a non- for profit. The money we raise is focused on microfinance which was pioneered by Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank. We put a little twist on capitalism - getting a piece of money earned by global conglomerates and than loaning it to someone for an opportunity at a better life. Thought it was a good way at having the ipod and knowing that I helped contribute to something bigger than me.
It’s amusing to me that all this money is spent on a website that is easily cloneable within a few weeks.
I have been working on a spider technology that crawls the internet and detects items that are on sale or heavily discounted. So far it only cost me $1,000 for two clustered Dell servers. I don’t understand how can these guys spend so much money on a website. My monthly budget is $20. So far I’m profitable.
Currently my technology is only a proof of concept and crawls less then 100 websites. No data feed, just pattern recognition(its’ hard!) and AI. Everything on the site is 100% automated. So, I don’t understand how much money they are expecting to make.
Maybe I’m just don’t know what I’m talking about or missing something.
can someone come up with a new idea? Or is everyone in the biz of refabbing an old idea and raising 3-5 million?
5 million dollars is nothing for these guys. They probably want to see if with just a little bit of funding how big, and fast it could get eclipsing all the ones around and not making it worth it for any others to enter the fray. The money will probably be spent on advertising to get their name out. The old dotcom adage “get big fast” I never heard of them before today. Now look at them being written up on Techcrunch.
Here is a nice roundup of Web 2.0 comparison shopping web sites:
http://probargainhunter.com/20.....on-engine/
What a pile of pants! This is nothing new and somehow they have managed to convince mashable and techcrunch to talk about them in a positive light. Just goes to show that when it comes to the online shopping market - Arrington does not have a clue!
i like your site
Yikes! $5M? I ditto Comment #8. What the heck are they gonna spend $5M on? Insane. Although not a comparison site, my coincidently named “_ _ _ _ _ _ fish.com” site was immediately profitable from affiliate revenue for less than $20 bucks/month.
If $5 million is primarily spent on hype, quite a gamble on any ROI when you are giving a chunk of your earnings away.