The King is Dead! Long Live The (Cashback) King?

Cashback in the news doesn’t seem to go away! This week I’ve received a few press releases from Submission Technology (the Greasy Palm people) regarding new white-labels and their acquisition of a tasty cashback domain plus there’s the latest installment of Awin vs Quidco on the network blog.

One could be forgiven in thinking that Affiliate Window have a bit of a penchant for the 100% cashback site Cashback Kings and are moving swiftly to push them forward as a viable alternative to the soon to be exiled Kings of Cashback. The King is Dead (at least with one network) - Long Live the (Cashback) King!

But Can They Really Rule?

Google Trends is a nifty little tool and it can be used to compare “daily unique visitors”. So if we compare the 100% cashback sites we see quite clearly the domination of the one over the many!

Seeing how these trends change after September 1st will certainly be something worth revisiting! Of course there’s question marks about the accuracy of the data but it paints a pretty interesting picture.

For other non-cashback sites it also paints a pretty gloomy picture! As mentioned above Submission Technology have new white-label site cashback partners - DLG, UKNetguide and Answerback. However, what chance do they have of being successful?

Let’s go back to those trends!

This time we’re looking at some of the most well known non-100% cashback sites!

Is there a decline? It does certainly look that way, at least for some of the sites featured. Perhaps this could be attributed to cashbackers moving to 100% sites or users moving to new sites like our own CashQuack (which in all honesty needs a miracle of biblical proportions to get going)?

Regardless, the trends aren’t upwards like Quidco (and to a smaller extent TopCashBack) in the top graph!

This does raise the question whether non-100% cashback sites have a future and whether big names looking to jump into the space are only doing so because their marketing manager has heard about them, heard that MSN are doing something cashbacky, and thinks it’s a great idea.

How the cashback landscape will change after September 1st remains to be seen, but it’s going to take a monumental effort from the pretenders to the throne to get the crown - at least based on the above - whilst new, and even established, non-100% sites have a serious battle on their hands to compete full stop.