The other bit of news to come out of Zillow.com is this: The real estate start-up is collecting, deploying and reselling advertising demographics in unique and interesting ways.
The vast quantities of demographic information — income, property values, credit scores — that will be collected in the new Mortgage Marketplace software will be stored in browser “cookies” on the user’s own computer. In other words, Zillow will not be storing this information in its own databases, but will retain control over it by means of software that will be able to access the cookies in future sessions on Zillow.com.
What this means is that Zillow will be able to deliver highly-targeted advertising to its users, zeroing in on products and services that would be most appealing to that user’s sex, age, income and other demographic characteristics.
This by itself will make Zillow extremely profitable to advertisers, who seek assurance that their promotional efforts are aimed at the right prospects.
But Zillow is also making these cookies available to other advertising vendors, such as Google’s Adwords system. By this means, other advertisers will be able to deploy the demographic information Zillow is collecting to target their own ads.
Obviously, the reselling of this demographic information is also a profit-center for Zillow.com — reports of whose financial demise may turn out to have been premature.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology, Zillow.com
David G from Zillow.com says:
I’m glad I managed to explain how a free product like Zillow Mortgage Marketplace can be a lucrative asset for a media business. I may not have properly explained how that works. Ads are shown to browsers according to their cookies. That’s how we show your EZ Ads for example to a buyer who browses from a listing in Phoenix to Zillow Discussions. We don’t sell the cookies, we sell ads and then we manage the way those ads are targeted (via cookies.) By working with our third-party ad network providers, we can also use those cookies to provide advertisements while users are on other affiliated Web sites.
April 2, 2008 — 10:59 pm
Greg Swann says:
Given the FUDfest last month, I deliberately presented this is in a neutral way, just to see how people would react. I may do a Marketing Minute about this today, just to cover the technology end of it.
April 3, 2008 — 8:19 am