Jody Rookstool may be remembered by future generations as the Papa of "Reciprocal Marketing." He developed the business model that pays Internet surfers as they browse and purchase goods online. That's the premise of PointClick.com, a privately held company.
Rookstool, chief executive officer and founder of PointClick.com, said he'd taken several approaches to business, some financially devastating, "before I found my true love in business — the Internet."
He and a programmer friend created a piece of software, but it wasn't easy keeping the project they were working on alive. Rookstool brought in a partner. And in December 1998, Rookstool sold the company for about $7 million in stocks and cash. With that, he funded PointClick.com.
PointClick.com started in June 1999, based on Rookstool's experience with affiliate marketing programs from companies like Amazon.com and Buy.com. The promise of that marketing was that anyone with a home page could make money from the Internet, he said. The reality was, no one's home page received any significant traffic.
What was needed, he decided, was a way to bring people — and not just any people, but those with the right demographic — to an advertiser's Web page.
With PointClick.com, Web surfers get a piece of the revenue they create by surfing on a site. As advertising revenue comes in from the various sites included in PointClick.com, the surfer receives cash that can be used to buy any product or service from any company in its network. Web site owners pay for actual traffic delivered to them, which is clearly measurable. And there's added incentive for PointClick surfers to buy on those sites, because they always receive a 10 percent discount, in addition to being able to spend the money they earn surfing.
PointClick.com now boasts that it's generating more than 75,000 million page views a week, putting it ahead of Lycos.com and Hotbot.com. PCDataOnline says the company is the No. 1 site on the entire Internet for the number of page views.
"To me, an entrepreneur is not just someone who starts a company. Anyone can do that. It's someone who finds a way to succeed despite insurmountable odds with determination and plain old hard work as his only tools to get it done," Rookstool says.