Featured Startup Pitch: CPA Lead—changing the online ad landscape with an unconventional approach

Company: CPAlead

Website: www.cpalead.com

Founders: Robert Reynolds and Troy Krzyston

Headquarters: Las Vegas

Year Founded: 2006

Twitter: @cpalead

Employees: 20+

Brief Company Description: “CPAlead is an online marketing company enabling web publishers to monetize their premium content.”

By Robert Reynolds, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

The CPAlead Widget is a web content monetization tool that provides consumers and web publishers with a payment alternative to traditional advertisements and paywalls. It works like this: when a person visits a website with premium content, they complete a brief survey, quiz or game, which unlocks the content they wish to view. These incentive-based offerings are sponsored by advertisers who then pay the website publisher for each one that is completed.

The CPAlead Widget is fully customizable for publishers so they may change the parameters, colors, background and font, and be more specific with their offers. This allows publishers to seamlessly integrate it into their website.

Founders’ Story

The concept for CPAlead was initially conceived in 2006 as a solution for online video gamers with limited financial resources. Our solution, at the time, allowed gamers to have advertisers pay for in-game rewards in exchange for the player’s interaction with advertisements. With this solution, we created the online virtual currency space. Streets-of-LA.com, the first online game to implement this technology, experienced a substantial revenue increase when the number of players utilizing our technology quickly and dramatically grew.

Having experienced such success with Streets-of-LA.com, my fellow CPAlead co-founder and then Streets-of-LA.com owner, Troy Krzyston, and I decided to commission this technology to third-party online games, such as Outwar.com, and create the first CPA network that specifically allowed online-games to build their in-game currency directly with advertisements. 

With this success, we took CPAlead one step further and introduced the concept to Second Life, one of the largest online economies in a virtual world. For each time a player interacted with an ad, the advertising company paid out a specific amount of real revenue. From these funds, CPAlead retained a portion and the player received a specific amount of virtual currency to purchase in-game content.

Having built a strong foundation in the virtual currency space, CPAlead sought to expand into the market with an offering that could be utilized on a larger scale. In 2008, CPAlead released our current solution, the CPAlead Widget.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We have mostly acquired customers through word-of-mouth marketing and our sales team, but we also have a strong presence in the online CPA community. However, we also run several campaigns throughout the year, like our current “Win Big with CPAlead” referral contest where web publishers can earn money from referring publishers to our solution. 

Differentiators

We set ourselves apart by maintaining a high moral and ethical standard in everything we do, with a unique adherence to industry regulation. The foundation of our business is trust and transparency so our customers, both on the publisher and advertiser side, know that they’re receiving quality service and payments they can stand behind. Not only do we monetize only content that web publishers legally have a right to publish, but we also provide the best payment options possible. 

Our standards translate beyond day-to-day strategy as we strive to make our mark in the community. As a socially-conscious company, CPAlead supports Kiva, a global organization that connects people through lending to alleviate poverty. We’re also active in our local Las Vegas community, recently receiving an award for helping with the local Children’s Cancer Foundation.

Business Model

CPAlead earns money through advertisers who opt-in to our services and through the deployment of internal products that allow us to monetize web traffic. CPAlead’s current focus is on the development of organic monetization tools that will allow us to enhance user experiences while providing both publishers and advertisers with a powerful solution.

Current Needs

We’re looking to educate web publishers and advertisers on the benefits of CPA, specifically, how they can use this technology to capitalize on their premium content, while simultaneously showing advertisers all of the benefits they can reap.

CPAlead – www.cpalead.com