Jellyfish.com

» see jellyfish.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every comparison shopping site in 2006 made its money the same quiet way. You searched, then you clicked through to a retailer and bought something. The site collected a few percent from that retailer for having sent you, and nobody advertised the arrangement because most shoppers never thought to ask. Jellyfish.com's founders looked at that arrangement and decided the interesting move was to tell people the commission existed and then give it to them.

Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire opened the beta in June 2006 out of Middleton, Wisconsin, which is not where shopping startups came from. Kegonsa Capital Partners had already bought a quarter of the company for around six hundred thousand dollars in February, and another five million followed that October. The pitch to retailers was that a rebate is a discount the retailer does not have to publish, so nobody's list price gets damaged.

The catch was structural. A rebate only makes someone switch search engines if the rebate is large and reliable, and it only stays large while the merchant network keeps paying out. Jellyfish was buying loyalty with venture money, which meant the loyalty had the same expiry date as the funding.

~ the dossier ~

~ smack ~

Smack Shopping was the part people actually remember, and it was closer to a game show than to shopping. A limited number of units of one product went up, and the price fell in real time while you watched. Wait longer and you paid less, but somebody else might take the last unit first. The countdown was the product.

It ran on genuine tension and it did not scale. You cannot build a durable retail business out of a mechanic that requires an audience to sit and stare at a falling number, and Jellyfish only had so many products it could feed into it.

~ what microsoft actually bought ~

Microsoft announced the acquisition in the first days of October 2007 at a reported fifty million dollars for a company of twenty-six people. Live Search was losing badly to Google and Microsoft had concluded that it could not win on results quality, so it would try winning on money instead. Jellyfish was the mechanism for that.

Live Search cashback launched on 22 May 2008 with around seven hundred merchants and a rebate that sometimes reached thirty percent. Jellyfish.com itself kept running alongside it for another nine months and then stopped at midnight on 16 February 2009. The people and the idea had already moved to Redmond, and the Wisconsin site was the leftover packaging.

~ the second death ~

Bing Cashback inherited the mechanic when Live Search was renamed, and Microsoft closed it on 30 July 2010. The stated reason was that too few people used it, which is the honest version of a finding that had been visible since 2006: paying a person to change their search habit works exactly as long as you keep paying.

None of this reached me and there was no way for it to. The rebate depended entirely on United States retailer affiliate programs, so from Turkey in 2008 there was nothing to sign up to even if you had wanted the money. The domain now belongs to an unrelated marketing agency, which answers on jellyfish.com today with no connection to any of the above.

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