Story how IE bought motivated traffic in the wild Internet times of 2011

The founder of the CPA network just told me this story so I am writing while hot.

There was a time when in Russia they did not know and did not understand anything about motivated traffic, but the States and Europe were already using it. For reference - motivated traffic is when your services are sold through an intermediary who promises the buyer some kind of benefit, for example, a cool in-game sword or in-game currency

In Russia, as it happens, a couple of students launched a CPA network to work with just such traffic. The guys were so successful that they were quickly bought by the CPA network company from Europe. But, the story is not about that.

For browsers, 2011 is notable for the fact that the share of Internet Explorer was 4 times more than Google Chrome. In Russia, in order to retain IE's share, Microsoft hired a marketing agency that realized by the end of the year that it was not meeting its KPIs. Well, it's understandable why - who needed IE? Remember how it was 10 years ago? Better not to remember, and even now it is lagging behind. People from the advertising agency found out about our guys and their CPA net. They bought blue browser installations through them and was shocked by the result - they fulfilled 90% of their KPIs in a very short time

The very next year Google became the market leader, and IE lost the market irrevocably.

This story reminded me of Uber, which in 2017 spent $ 100M on ad networks that, as it turned out, were not working. As a result, Uber was able to cut $ 100 million in annual advertising costs - and did not find a drop in downloads.

Well, what are we? We carefully monitor our marketing and do not allow such situations.