Leapfish at (leapfish.com) isn’t a scam, but I think they don’t offer any value either. They are a meta search engine which draws results from other search engines. They are portal you can customize for things like local news and weather, which you can do with any of the real search engines as well. The product they offer is buying permanent placement for keywords, which ranges from a few hundred dollars into the thousands.
Not good traffic for a portal.
The problem is, according to Compete.com they only got 145,000 visitors in Feb 2010 which stinks (I have friends with blogs who get 50,000 a month). Some months it spikes up, so they’re probably spending money from the keyword sales on pay per clicks. Nothing wrong with doing that, except you can’t tell how much traffic they’re really getting or how many actual users have them as their home page.
Now, say you buy a keyword spot (I was quoted $1,800 for a third place listing). How many of 145,000 visitors will type that in, and of that, how many will click your ad out of the three sponsored above the Google listings? One blogger was listed second for a keyword with Leapfish, so he looked through a year of logs, and they received 2 visitors for that keyword from Leapfish. One of them was the rep who called to buy placement!
To give some prospective, according to Compete.com Google received 141 million visitors in Feb, Bing got 51 million (after being up and running only 1 year). Spending thousands on a keyword with the whole place getting just 145,000 visitors a month is a waste of money.
They’ve also had some problems with business practices like click fraud, astroturfing, and I was personally called 19 times by different reps. They said they don’t have a “do not call list”, that I’m just going to be called forever by them if they find us on Google Adwords.
I predict anyone who buys into this will get screwed when they close up. It’s not sustainable since they’re going to eventually run out of valuable keywords to sell, then there’s no money for the pay per clicks to bring in their traffic. If you have experience with them please drop a comment.
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I am fortunate to be living in a country where much of what they do may be challenged as illegal but I don’t have anything nice to say about them. Especially after they said some very, very rude things about me and potentially where the ones behind some fairly nasty trolling – all because I reviewed them being aware of them after the CEO sued a blogger he hired to write about a prior enterprise (e-perks). Mostly I just join in the leapfish game on twitter which is a but of fun using their favorite hash tag.
Hey Matt,
Yeah the most damning stories were over at TechCrunch and their Alexa ranking, Leapfish just doesn’t have enough traffic to be of value for what they’re charging.