Not a big surprise, really — Root shuts down its lead generation exchange. At one point there were a lot of really awesome, capable people there.

Looks like Lead Critic has picked up on Root Markets’ media buy or partnership or whatever with Yahoo!, indicating that Root is paying for the advertising space. What a shame - I’ll bet the clickthrough and conversion rate on this creative were pretty woeful; it appears to utilize none of the best practices that companies like NexTag, LowerMyBills, Adchemy (Ratemarketplace) and others have spent years and millions of dollars discovering, including the rather obvious “Apply Now” mistake.
I didn’t get to see the landing page user experience, so I won’t comment on that but I reposted the image from Lead Critic of the creative, so you can get a quick sense of what they’re talking about.

A friend just pointed me to a October 11th ClickZ article that references my departure from Root as well as that of Greg Yardley. Wow, and I didn’t think many people read my blog. I wish I’d known ahead of time, I would have beefed up the advertising links on the page with things that appeal to the average ClickZ reader .. I didn’t think my name had appeared in ClickZ since I worked for Jupitermedia (which owned both ClickZ and Jupiter Research at the time and now owns neither) but turned out it appeared there when I left Jupiter to go to NetRatings and in one subsequent article related to online shopping when I was running commerce analytics over there. Interesting.

I have not yet widely disseminated the news, but as of this week I am no longer working at Root Markets. I will not expand on the specific details of the situation over and above the following: the firm did some internal restructuring to focus on direct sales and technology related to the core Exchange product, which entailed making a number of employee changes, which changes included most of my bicoastal team and I. As a member of the Root advisory board, I still have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do but some of the initiatives I was working on (though certainly valuable) were ahead of where the service currently needs to be from a resourcing perspective. Nuff said.

I am excited to be launching a consulting firm named Fynbos Group (www.fynbosgroup.com — the website is still under construction and I will unveil it soon!). I have had a fortunate position over the last 10 years working closely with and within emerging online firms and now want to directly apply these experiences to help other firms generate revenue online (whether from advertising, lead generation, subscriptions, ecommerce or something brand new). The pipeline is developing nicely but please contact me at rob (at) fynbosgroup (.) com to discuss your particular needs.

Where is the name from? Fynbos is the natural shrubland vegetation occurring in a small belt of the Western Cape of South Africa. Of the world’s six floral kingdoms, this is the smallest and richest per area unit. The diversity of fynbos plants is greater than that of the tropical rainforests, with over 8,000 species of plants occurring in the Western Cape area, around 5,000 of which do not occur anywhere else in the world.

Rafat has a post on paidcontent.org about the New York Times company making an investment in Root’s online lead generation business. We’re obviously very excited about it.

“You don’t know if you’re paying for the right person,” Brewer said.

A wrong-headed notion from a banking executive at Barclays about online customers, taken from this article about consumer finance companies lagging in terms of online advertising spending, even though the majority of consumers are researching these products online. Even though I’d argue that the statement above is ludicrous, I can see how given the current landscape, some in the financial services industry can believe the Internet is an inferior channel for product and customer acquisition.

This is precisely the reason why we are doing what we are doing — not just some of our lead generation activities but Root Vaults as well. By giving more power in the provision of consumer information back to the consumer him/herself, and providing increased transparency to market participants about how data is used (including limiting the sale-resale practices of same) via the Root Exchange, online becomes THE acquisition channel of choice.

Then perhaps I’ll stop getting the “Your current invoice” and “Please sign up for our service” direct mail pieces from the same company sent to the same address to the same person on the same day (they know me SOOOO well!).

Root Markets’ CEO Seth Goldstein will be participating (Jeff Clavier) in SDForum’s Search SIG meeting on March 16th in the Valley. I bet it will be a very interesting event and would encourage those around to check it out. I, alas, will most probably not be in town that day…

Our news was picked up a few places, but here is the link to the release on our $10 million funding (Root Markets). /ROOT Markets Inc., the first financial exchange for consumer leads, today announced the completion of its initial round of funding. The $10 million round is led by Executive Chairman Lew Ranieri.