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$712,321.18 Direct Buy Case Study (23)

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Disclaimer: Do direct buys with torrent sites at your own discretion...

The Details:

• $712,321 Revenue. $384,006 Spend. $328,315 Profit.
• Direct Buy with [edited], a large torrent site. Ran intermittently may 2012 to feb 2013
• Bought 100% global inventory of their 'pop layer' - an 800x400 overlay on the site.
• Primarily ran geo targeted dating campaigns - a mix of chat and warning that had been field tested on self serve (tj, exo etc)
• Also had success with gambling, seduction, pin submit and cam.

Background

As a part of their mandate, the spy division of the alliance regularly hand spies & utilizes tools like the Alexa top 500 in certain geos and looks to identify sites and networks that are open to 'direct response type campaigns'. Torrent, File Hosting, Streaming, adult tube etc tend to be easy targets as they are high volume and flexible in what they let run.

In Germany, [edited] was one of the sites quickly identified as a prime target. High volume, in a grey area that scared away legitimate advertisers, & best of all, not already saturated with affiliate ads. [edited] was an alexa ranked 56 german site, and 500ish worldwide. 36% of visitors were German, 18% were US, and 6% were UK. It got 2 million uniques/day and about 7 page views per user.

[edited] was desperate as their previous advertiser, a cam site - had pulled out after gateway issues. We agreed to a 1 day test discounted rate for $2750, quickly threw up some creative for the top geos & promptly returned $7200. A month was secured for $100k, 50% upfront.

Creative Strategy:

Our initial test went very well, but since we were getting 100% of the traffic, there was some concern that the ads (& by extension the offers) would burn out quicker than usual. The top 10 countries or so were split to 3 different campaigns/offers: chat, rules/warning, & win an ipad. For non geo targeted, we did a catch all with Pandora's Box - a PPS seduction product which we had previously had heavy success with.

Instead of doing large banners to fit the space, as the pop was full html we simply ran landers resized to fit the space:



Chat performed the strongest, with Edates.de being our strongest performer. I believe we played around with different splits but throughout the run ran at least 50% chat. Sound ended up having a big effect, and adding facebook/skype/etc chat sounds pushed up the conversion substantially.

Things Fall Apart:

After the first month of success, another silent bidder entered the mix forcing us to continuously push up our monthly rate in order to secure the traffic. This happened a few times, and in effort to remove the monthly uncertainty, we secured 3 months for 130k/month. Unfortunately, after the first month of this new deal, [edited] pulled the plug on us - citing adult content - and began running their new advertiser, who promptly began running adult content.

The next month we were asked to submit a bid over 170k in order to compete, ostensibly as the competitor had put in a bid for 165k.

Recognizing that the other advertiser and the alliance were likely being played off against each other in order to artificially raise the price, we approached the competitor directly, confirmed both our suspicions and struck a deal with them for 50% of the traffic. We feigned complete disinterest to [edited], the other advertiser refused to negotiate, and the traffic was bought for 100k.

This under the table deal lasted another few months until [edited]'s traffic went AWOL after they were aggressively targeted by Germany and EU.

Misc:

• At one point we attempted to broker the sale of the site in exchange for a %.
• We monetized remnant traffic by installing self serve software on our share.
• Angles & creative that caught traction on large self serve (TJ, etc) were ported over to [edited] with long lasting success
• [edited] opened up as a replacement. Popunder inventory is available...
  
  
  

Any questions, please fire away....

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This is really Inspiring, Firstly Coz the numbers involved are huge, secondly coz you risked this huge amount as the site wasn't established...Congrats Mate !!

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Nice case study mate! Seems like one of your images are broken?

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Lol I remember the whole thing while in Prague

Anyway , Christian is bauss!

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Mind blowing.

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big times!!!!

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Awesome case study. I love that instead of getting played by the site owner you flipped the script on him and teamed up with your competition. Well played!

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Awesome case study!

Btw: after being busted by the feds they moved to a new domain, movie4k.to, maybe you can make a buy there too.

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that shit cray.

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Very, very cool!

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Which one? Both showing up for us, but we'll fix...

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Images: I'm not seeing the lander image either for some reason.

But nonetheless, great case study! Thanks very much!

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You sir...are a genius!

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What exactly is "the alliance" and who must I kill to join this brotherhood???

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Hey ratalliance, I'm surprise to see that the dating advertisers, especially edates would buy the leads from torrent site. Most of the time all these torrent traffic doesn't back out for them very well. But anyway, superb case study and I'll give this 1000000 x Likes!

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what kind of adserver can handle this kind of traffic ? also what kind of spec of dedi server, this must be tons of traffic, I smell money

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Thanks for posting this, it's very motivating. Media buying excites me, can't wait to try it in the future. I guess it doesn't get spoken about too often because that's where the major money is.

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- if you have 3-4 good combinations of Angle: Offer (dating, pin submit, etc ) you can often take over 100% of a sites traffic
and blow out the self serves & make the site owner more cash

- Self Serve platforms are the best to sniff out trending Angle : Offer combos that you can move them to bigger places with no competition... (and scraping them properly can often allow you to detect affiliates with hot Angle : Offer combos that cant scale it because they lack resources or cash flow )

Re this particular case study:

Our Senior members never checked stats once on this deal... it was all handled by our team infrastructure.......

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Quick question, how did you contact your competitor? Emailed their whois?

Great case study

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Rat it seems like you're not having any fun? Are you ok?

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were doing OK...

btw you got something stuck between your teeth!

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all will be revealed. or at least some...

thanks. we actually had no complaints regarding quality. Re: edates, as advertisers go they are amongst the most liberal with quality. I don't actually recall any quality issues with them besides for minor countries like Brazil and Italy, but that has been a network wide issue, not particular to us.
Glad it stirred to fire in your soul. In our mind, media buying is one of the simplest ways to create a steady, passive income. There's no need to reinvent the wheel angle or offer wise. Spy around for what's working. Identify sites far down the chain to suit your budget (i believe Finch posted an excellent nugget recently in regards to finding smaller sites). You don't need an ad server for this. Just give them a banner ad or 2, and go.

Thanks. It didn't take much detective work. Their adserver quickly identified them. From there, we just did some digging for a contact on linkedin and got in touch. FYI - this was not an affiliate, but a major advertising network that we cut the deal with.

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My takeaway from this is to start a torrent site. Except for the whole going to jail thing.

Rat, I understand you brokered a flat rate, but did you look at cost/impressions to see what your effective CPM was? What about CTR and conversion rate?

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