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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Online business owner network MerchantCircle (www.merchantcircle.com) has launched its "Pay-Per-Action" program, which provides partners and ad agencies access to the MerchantCircle network, which draws 20 million unique consumer visitors each month.
According to its Thursday announcement, the PPA platform enables partners to leverage the MerchantCircle network and deliver highly targeted, local customer leads, offering an alternative to the keywords-based Pay-Per-Click standard offered by companies like Google (www.google.com) and tyBit (www.tyBit.com).
"We're excited about this new platform, which benefits local business owners during the recession, and helps put their marketing dollars to work in a way that translates into tangible customers as a result," MerchantCircle vice president Darren Waddell said in a statement. "With more than 20 million unique visitors a month and growing, we're committed to helping all local business owners by connecting them with local customers seeking their products and services."
PPA features include highly targeted lead delivery defined by locale and business category, and a fully automated and scalable platform. Also, all activities are trackable, participating businesses receive increased online visibility, and customers only pay for performance. Initial partners include OpenTable, Citysearch, ServiceMagic, NearbyNow, and eLocalListing, as well as Yodle (www.yodle.com), which provides online marketing.
"We've teamed up with MerchantCircle to provide an additional source of targeted leads for our local business-owner clients," Yodle chief executive officer Court Cunningham said in a statement. "With MerchantCircle's large local consumer traffic, our clients have even more opportunity to find more quality local leads. The best part is our clients only pay for performance."
MerchantCircle's PPA launch comes on the heels of other recent partnerships with businesses including online marketing provider Web.com (www.web.com) and distributed media provider Demand Media (www.demandmedia.com), which have both helped grow MerchantCircle's local business community and improve the local search experience.
MerchantCircle is now the fifth largest Internet Yellow Page directory in the US, according to Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) data.
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October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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