A Publisher's View of the Trenches

I caught up today with Jeremy Bencken, Founder and CEO of ApartmentRatings.com. ApartmentRatings, a leader in Rental vertical search with a strong renter review aspect, has been offering Presence-based leads to their advertisers for several months now.

ApartmentRatings is extremely focused on the site visitor experience and the value proposition to the advertiser. An astute publisher, ApartmentRatings recognizes that the site visitor experience is, at least partially, predicated on advertiser responsiveness. ApartmentRatings sees the flaws that consumers perceive with email and phone as direct response methods. Internet consumers, who want instant answers, no longer find waiting for the indeterminant email or phone response from merchants acceptable. Indeed, lack of confidence that a merchant will reply impedes consumer response to advertisements, at all.

Jeremy's take: "Presence-based ads that allow a site visitor to immediately interact with the advertiser is a true win-win-win. The site visitor is happy since they can get answers right away. The advertiser is happy because they get to actually interact with their prospect in real-time which improves their sales process and prospects. And I'm happy because my two main constituent groups are happy. Talking to a real human being in real time is revelation for both parties, and exceeds both sides’ expectations for the online experience.”

But there were issues to address. Presence-based ads had never been used in the Apartments vertical. Obviously there was no precedent for pricing or business model. Further consumer response was hard to predict. Thus ApartmentRatings had to first educate advertisers on the anticipated benefits of presence-based ads. ApartmentRatings selected a particularly progressive advertiser to work with to jointly develop a revenue model that worked for both publisher and advertiser. Then Apartment Ratings had to coach merchants on how to converse with online prospects in a way that would answer their questions and not scare them away. Finally, ApartmentRatings had to prove the results to the advertisers of the initial deployments. From those early learnings, ApartmentRatings has developed programs to take to additional early-adopter advertisers.