Merchants

When people don’t like you, but they need you

Nobody really likes merchants. Throughout history, merchants have always been irritating. Nobody likes dealing with the Dutch (technically, most mercantile groups, but it’s easiest to dunk on the Dutch).

Why? The perception of the value of work is highly dependent upon its visibility in the physical world. Everybody can see a barista make coffee and understand how she created value. She turned milk and beans into a drinkable drink. But nobody really cares about a commodities broker, even though he was the guy who brought the beans from Sumatra to America. If most people were to learn that he made a million dollars from calling a seller in Jakarta and then calling a buyer in San Diego, they would probably be a bit peeved. He didn’t do anything, after all (but five thousand baristas across America now have beans to turn into lattes).

I am a click merchant. I sell clicks on the internet.

There are a lot of more respectable ways of saying that, of course, but the reality is that Discosloth (our agency) is a merchant of clicks. Folks in the business will call themselves things like growth marketing partner, or paid search management agency, or demand generation company, but at the end of the day, when all is taken into account, we’re really just paid to get people click the right buttons.

I don’t build the websites, I don’t fulfill the orders, I didn’t create the ad platform, I didn’t do anything except create a campaign that surfaces the right content to the right people.

Selling clicks on the internet is a long way from the Hanseatic League, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Clicks or coffee, it’s really just the same thing.

I find my job interesting because it’s the closest thing in the internet industry to a commodities brokerage. You’re just connecting people who want something to other people who have what they want. There are billions of people and billions of buttons on the internet. My entire job is making sure those billions of people click on very specific buttons (which usually say something like “Buy Now” or “Add To Cart” or “Contact Us”).

It’s even more similar to a commodities brokerage because the compensation is tied to the volume and value of the transactions you’re brokering through these clicks. If someone spends $1 on a click, I might make anywhere from $0.05 to $0.25.

Now, the respectable and fashionable among us, those who like Certifications and Credentials and Social Proof, probably feel a pang of existential guilt, because it’s taboo to say we sell clicks. But nothing’s ever happened on the internet without a click. There are a lot of layers on top of this click, mostly to ensure our clients are only paying for relevant clicks, but it all boils down to the button.

I’d argue that my specific niche is one of the least respected, most misunderstood, and most autistic of all internet marketing—simply because we’re merchants. (We are not the most dramatic or degenerate niche, at least: that award goes to SEO). Our compensation is tied to how much volume we process. It scales well.

Where the dislike for the mercantile model comes into play is that the compensation is not necessarily tied to the specific labor or costs involved in business. A good click-merchant is not paid according to how many hours he spends brokering clicks. He is paid according to his effectiveness, the amount of revenue he brings, and how efficiently it is done. One of the great things about the digital ad model is that it’s highly attributable and revenue-adjacent. Just like a coffee broker can charge more if his service is high-quality, fast, dependable, and knowledgeable, so the click broker can charge more.

If you know many software developers, especially those in large corporations, you’ll hear the common distaste for the software sales guys. I have heard countless complaints about how much the biz dev guys make. It usually goes something like “This SDR guy in the sales department was the highest compensated guy at the company last year…can you believe that? He can’t even code a hello world script!”

The SDR guy is simply a merchant. Without him, the developer would be sitting at his desk surrounded by Star Wars plushies, with a fountain of limitless programming skill, but without a thing to do. Until the SDR guy connects him with a paying client, his immense talent is simply simmering without a purpose.

(It doesn’t help that the SDR guy’s desk doesn’t have any Star Wars plushies on it, and he’s rarely actually even sitting at the desk. When he does come in, he instead has framed pictures of a beautiful wife and kids, something usually absent on the developer’s desk).

People don’t like merchants.

They don’t like the coffee broker. They don’t like the deal broker. They don’t like the Dutch.*

Understandable. We’re not very likable. We just sell shiploads of coffee beans - or clicks on the net.

*or Phoenicians, Greeks, the Hanseatic League, Jews, Armenians, et al