The Great Lead Auction
A story I find quite interesting today is one that the Daily Mail owned website thisismoney has signed a deal with paaleads to sell its leads.
Paaleads is owned by moneysupermarket and is basically an Ebay style system where people in the financial world can bid for leads generated by other sites.
So in this case, people go onto the thisismoney website and log their interest, in say a mortgage, the lead is then passed to the paaleads site where it is put up for auction and the highest bidder gets the lead.
This sort of system is not unique and there are several other buying and selling networks for affiliates, but perhaps paaleads will become the largest one. The site also has a similar deal with its parent company Moneysupermarket as well as Moneyweb, Yourmortgage and Mymortgagekey.
Paaleads separates out the leads into things like Mortgage, Remortgage, Adverse and Pensions advice and also lets people just bid on leads within a particular geographic region. It also has a facility where a monthly budget of lead spend can be set up.
All very interesting, but I wonder if the users of these so-called comparison sites really know what goes on behind the scenes.
