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Prizewall.com Wants a Piece of TreeLoot's Pie

PrizeWall.com, a contest site that will emulate the highly successful TreeLoot.com, will steal some of its competitor's thunder with a launch in 60 to 90 days. The new player may run headfirst into a lawsuit, however, as TreeLoot.com has a patent-pending for its site's technology.

TreeLoot.com is a simple contest site that asks a user to continually click his cursor on an animated tree. After each click the user is asked to try again and is served up a new banner advertisement.

After a certain number of clicks, users are offered a stuffed monkey if they provide detailed demographic information such as income, interests and an e-mail address. Users also are offered incentives such as Banana Bucks to click on banners.

The site serves more than 300 million impressions monthly. It also has collected a database of more than one million targeted e-mail addresses.

PrizeWall.com plans to take aspects of the TreeLoot.com site and add its own spin by allowing advertisers to distribute coupons, e-mail newsletter offers and other marketing devices. The site will kick off with $1 million grand prize offering as well as daily prizes.

“TreeLoot was so successful and all you do is click on a tree. Here you just click on a wall,” said Maria L. Perez, marketing and public relations manager at Go3, Fairfax, VA. Go3 is PrizeWall.com's parent company. “We took the best pieces of TreeLoot and iWon.com.”

Perez refused to provide details about what it considered the best part of the iWon.com site.

“It's pretty original,” said Travis Tisa sarcastically. Tisa is director of sales and marketing at Virtumundo Inc., Kansas City, KA, which runs TreeLoot.com and CarHunt.com. “They've got their work cut out for them. It's a lot to maintain a site like TreeLoot.”

PrizeWall.com must be careful not to copy the site too closely as TreeLoot's technology may soon be patent protected. “We are patent pending. We do intend to enforce that,” Tisa said.

This shouldn't be a problem, said Perez. “We have a different algorithm. We're confident that our [technology] will not be an issue.”

As far as PrizeWall.com improving on TreeLoot's offering to advertisers by adding the ability to serve coupons and other offers, Tisa said, “We don't really see a need for it. We're in the business of providing free games for our players, not to ram advertising down their throats.”

Overall, TreeLoot isn't concerned about the new company biting off of its idea. “When they get up to being a Media Metrix ranked top 50 site, they'll peak my interest,” he said. “We're consistently in the top 100.”

PrizeWall.com is planning a major marketing blitz when it launches. It will have an athlete as a spokesperson as well as a leprechaun. “We're going to do a publicity stunt a la 'Where's Waldo?' with the leprechaun. He'll be all over the place.”

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