The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare (longread
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Date: October 17th, 2017 11:05 AM Author: hyperactive spot
Indeed, one would never have predicted looming lawsuits from a friendly 2015 email exchange, in which Casper CEO Philip Krim attempted to court an affiliate marketer named Jack Mitcham, who ran a Sleepopolis-like site called Mattress Nerd.
In January 2015, Krim wrote Mitcham that while he supported objective reviews, “it pains us to see you (or anyone) recommend a competitor over us.”
Krim went on: “As you know, we are much bigger than our newly formed competitors. I am confident we can offer you a much bigger commercial relationship because of that. How would you ideally want to structure the affiliate relationship? And also, what can we do to help to grow your business?”
When Mitcham responded to say that he and his wife found the Casper mattress uncomfortable, Krim persisted:
“Is there any way I could get you to spend more time on the Casper?…We would even be happy to fly you out to NYC to tell you more about the product or have you spend a long weekend on one. I’d also love to find ways to work more closely. We would love to become your biggest referral check.”
Krim then upped his offer, promising to boost Mitcham’s payouts from $50 to $60 per sale, and offering his readers a $40 coupon. “I think that will move sales a little more in your direction,” replied Mitcham on March 25, 2015. In the months that followed, Mattress Nerd would become one of Casper’s leading reviews site partners. (The emails surfaced due to another mattress lawsuit, GhostBed v. Krim; if similar correspondence exists with Derek Hales, it has not become public.)
Just a few months later, in June 2015, something big happened that would ripple through the whole mattress ecosystem: Casper received $55 million in Series B investment at an implied half-billion-dollar valuation, making it the front-runner in the online mattress wars.
The company started spending relentlessly on advertising, and soon just about everyone had heard of Casper, giving the startup a measure of escape velocity from its competitors. Casper’s sales topped $200 million last year, though it declines to say whether it is profitable. Fortune has estimated Casper’s annual marketing budget to be $80 million.
As Casper grew, more mattress reviews sites began mushrooming up in its shadow, earning quick commissions while creating little value for Casper. Casper decided to allow the contracts it held with affiliates to expire, “to reassess the situation,” Casper CEO Krim told me.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34461960) |
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Date: October 17th, 2017 11:17 AM Author: spruce arousing patrolman jew
yelp is rigged fraudlies pay-to-play shit, too.
and the "yelp for consumer products" is amazon reviews, which are also rigged fraudlies.
it's all a scam.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34462036) |
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Date: October 17th, 2017 10:58 AM Author: hyperactive spot
The question of just how much money Derek made off Sleepopolis interested everyone I spoke to. It had even been the subject of a gossipy, if rigorously argued, post on a site positioning itself as a gadfly of the mattress industry, HonestMattressReviews.com. (A court later determined that, despite the site’s name, the owner of Honest Mattress Reviews had concealed ties to the mattress company GhostBed.)
According to the website analysis tool SimilarWeb, Derek referred 1.6 million visits to outside sites between February 2016 and July 2017. Much of this traffic went to Amazon.com (when Derek lacked a direct affiliate relationship, he was able to get at least some money as an affiliate of Amazon). A significant portion went to the mattress companies Purple, Loom & Leaf, and Nest Bedding.
A Loom & Leaf executive told me they had paid Derek $100,000 in 2016; Nest Bedding’s CEO Joe Alexander said he had paid Derek a multiple of that. “My life changed because of Derek,” Alexander told me. “He made me a millionaire.”
But by far the most traffic during that period–some 400,000 visits–was referred out to the website of Derek’s favorite mattress company, Leesa.
Nest Bedding CEO Joe Alexander [Photo: courtesy of Joe Alexander]
Derek’s Leesa favoritism was no secret: he explicitly called it “Sleepopolis’s favorite mattress,” and a sidebar touting Leesa affiliate-link coupons graced nearly every page of the site. Mattress reviewers say their art entails recommending different mattresses to different types of sleepers, but in the 14 categories on his site for which the Leesa was eligible, Derek declared it first in seven of them, second or third in all but two of the rest. The Leesa was Sleepopolis’s best mattress for side sleepers, best mattress for kids, best mattress for back pain, and best mattress for sex.
It was possible that Derek genuinely loved the Leesa above all other mattresses; he’d reviewed it favorably even before Casper cut off his payments. But many people I spoke to suggested that other things were possible, too. If most mattress companies paid around $50 per commission, other companies paid two or three times that, even as much as $250. In one email I saw, an unscrupulous mattress reviewer said companies regularly approached him offering to “buy” top placement on his site; so long as the reviewer liked the mattress, he’d happily negotiate a price. “Honestly, the FTC has to step in at some point and make review sites divulge what they are paid for each bed or brand,” Nest Bedding’s Joe Alexander, told me. “This industry is a freight train out of control.”
Was Leesa playing this highest-bidder game with Sleepopolis? At first, I heard many rumors to that effect. I called Leesa’s CEO David Wolfe in February, in an effort to find out. The middle-aged Wolfe, though now a resident in Virginia Beach, retained a charming British accent, and was a former marketer himself. The mattress industry has long been attractive to marketers, I learned, even before the internet got involved. As a mattress industry analyst recently told Freakonomics Radio: “You have to be a strong marketer to be in the mattress industry, because they’re really selling identical, rectangular slabs.”
Wolfe denied offering higher affiliate rates than competitors, saying he had always paid $50 per mattress, apart from one month when he had paid 60. He later repeated this assertion and had his lawyer call me to confirm it, and said he felt it was important for mattress companies and affiliates to operate on a level playing field.
I asked Wolfe if he had ever offered Derek Hales a guaranteed income. Our friendly conversation took a swift turn. “The answer is no,” he said, adding, “You should leave this to the attorneys.” Later, he added, “I don’t want to say something that could affect a pending lawsuit where Leesa is not a party.”
SimilarWeb suggested that Derek referred 400,000 visits to Leesa.com between February 2016 and July 2017. If you assumed that about one in 12 referred visits ultimately led to a purchase—a conservative estimate according to people in the mattress industry I interviewed—that would suggest Sleepopolis helped sell 33,000 mattresses. Even a $50 commission per mattress meant $1.6 million paid by Leesa to Derek over those 18 months. When I approached Leesa’s David Wolfe with these numbers, he called them inflated (SimilarWeb provides only estimates), but conceded that Derek was essentially Leesa’s top salesman, accounting for 18% of the brand’s total sales, which reached about $80 million last year.
All told, these numbers suggested Derek may have been making as much as $2 million per year by 2016. And his site, in a hypothetical sale, would be worth a multiple of that. (A considerably less trafficked mattress-reviewing site recently went on the market for $1.4 million.)
Derek had made millionaires among the new mattress entrepreneurs–and he himself was one of them. So while Derek’s pockets weren’t nearly so deep as Casper’s, they certainly weren’t shallow. He had stumbled into what was, outside of financial products, one of the more lucrative niches in affiliate marketing. If this was a David-and-Goliath battle, it was worth remembering that David became a king.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34461930) |
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Date: October 17th, 2017 1:48 PM Author: Irate institution
https://assets.fastcompany.com/image/upload/w_707,ar_16:9,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_lossy/wp-cms/uploads/2017/07/p-1-feature-218-casper-cant-rest.jpg
The Casper team—Neil Parikh, Philip Krim, Luke Sherwin, Gabriel Flateman, and Jeff Chapin—is now grappling with unexpectedly major success.
In early May, the online mattress startup Casper celebrated its third birthday in whimsical style with an event, held in its New York headquarters, modeled after a 3-year-old’s birthday party. There was face-painting, piñatas, and—in a necessary concession to adulthood—a free-flowing open bar. They even hired a balloon guy. “He really put the artist in balloon artist,” says cofounder and CTO Gabriel Flateman, whose company has transformed the mattress business with smart design, low prices, and a clever business model. “He made me this intricate jet pack I was wearing around. I mean, he made a knockoff Chanel bag! But the magician canceled at the last minute, which kind of sucked.”
(CEO Krim is the oldest. the rest are in their late 20s)
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34463152) |
Date: October 17th, 2017 11:32 AM Author: up-to-no-good chapel regret
Mattresses have been scams forever, what a disgusting market.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34462168)
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Date: October 17th, 2017 11:49 AM Author: Cerise Big Personal Credit Line Plaza
Ok, everything is fraudlies. Got it. Except the greatbort, right?
What's the xo consensus on best mattress? I may be in the market soon.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34462348) |
Date: October 17th, 2017 3:20 PM Author: mischievous vengeful headpube
SimilarWeb suggested that Derek referred 400,000 visits to Leesa.com between February 2016 and July 2017. If you assumed that about one in 12 referred visits ultimately led to a purchase—a conservative estimate according to people in the mattress industry I interviewed—that would suggest Sleepopolis helped sell 33,000 mattresses. Even a $50 commission per mattress meant $1.6 million paid by Leesa to Derek over those 18 months. When I approached Leesa’s David Wolfe with these numbers, he called them inflated (SimilarWeb provides only estimates), but conceded that Derek was essentially Leesa’s top salesman, accounting for 18% of the brand’s total sales, which reached about $80 million last year.
He sold the website for $3M, even though by some estimates it was worth $6M.
LOLOLOL @ becoming a fucking ATTORNEY.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34463909) |
Date: October 18th, 2017 1:08 AM Author: Trip ivory pit
*INTERNET surveys the impenetrable, overbearing, consumer-unfriendly nightmare that a modern industry has become*
*INTERNET steps in like boss hero, burning through the mire with the flaming sword of efficiency"
*INTERNET stands astride the flaming corpse of said industry*
*INTERNET turns to u, breaks out in a disturbing rictus grin*
INTERNET: "hehe now I'll show u what a nightmare TRULY looks like"
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3766614&forum_id=2#34468378) |
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