While Jellyfish will not be live for another month or so, I’m getting excited about the launch. And it’s not just because Mark McGuire is the president of the company…ok, he’s heard that joke before…and anyways, my favorite first baseman was Don Mattingly (even though the Mets are my team). Enough sports.

I met the Brian Wiegand, the CEO of Jellyfish back in January. While he wouldn’t spill the beans on the ‘new’ model Jellyfish adopted, we discussed a number of challenges the traditional shopping comparison engines faced. While Brian is waiting a bit longer to release Jellyfish, reading Jellyfish’s blog (and I’d recommend subscribing to the feed), will help you understand some of what Brian, Mark, and the Jellyfish team are thinking about.

Themes from the blog:
-Transparency in marketing…part throwback to Seth Godin’s ‘permission marketing’, part John Battelle’s ‘database of intentions’, part RootMarket’s paying for the user’s attention
-Merchant reviews need some cleaning up…CNNMoney.com wrote a representative article on this recently, and every interview I’ve done in the last 3 months has brought up this topic
-Challenges with pay per click listings…potential for click fraud…price floors…spammy sites…shopping comparison engines bidding against retailers and therefore driving up costs for their clients…difficulty innovating the user experience when the engine has to monetize the click as quickly as possible

So taking all these themes, I talked with Brian and Mark to get a couple more specifics. Jellyfish wants to empower the consumer and to do this had to build a new ad model. Well, I don’t think it’s completely new – more a throwback to some pre-dotcom bust ideas and drawing from some very smart lead generation concepts – but it’s a refreshing change from the status quo. One major plus to the system is that Jellyfish provides its merchants with a risk free advertising opportunity; we’re not talking about pay per click.

Jellyfish will not release the number of merchant feeds the company has aggregated, but look to this statistic for an early indication of merchant interest.

As for consumer adoption…the gut reaction most people have is that we don’t need anymore darn shopping comparison engines. The truth, though, is that I’ve been getting a call a week from VCs asking me to look at new shopping comparison engines. Even though nearly 20m people went to Shopping.com and Shopzilla last month (according to comScore), we’re still very early in the ecommerce game. There’s a lot of room left for new engines that put the consumer first…this is what makes job search sites like Indeed & SimplyHired so attractive. As Mark Johnson reminded me a couple months ago, “Focusing on user experience is the only way to build loyalty.”