Harrison Gevirtz: The Yearling
By: Alexandra Wharton
Harrison Gevirtz surfs his Treo during his
morning commute, tries to fit in emails
with affiliate managers during the day
and takes phone calls during dinnertime, much to
the chagrin of his family.
This sounds like any hard worker in the performance
marketing space, you think. The only
difference is that Gevirtz is a freshman. No, he
is not a freshman in college, not the next Shawn
Fanning (of Napster fame) working out of a dorm
room. Gevirtz is a freshman in high school – a 15-
year-old wunderkind.
Gevirtz first got exposed to the world of online
commerce by selling diamonds and stamps through
eBay auctions and Overstock Auctions when he was
12 years old. Mostly he sold items in the hundred-dollar
range but once he sold a $4,000 diamond.
The experiences were exhilarating but he was not so
thrilled with the shipping process – packing material
filled his bedroom and the every-other-day trips
to the post office were a drag.
Next, Gevirtz built a MySpace help site through a
turnkey solution that cost him $12 on the Digital Points
forum. He promoted the site through "basic marketing
initiatives like directory submissions" and uploaded ads
and also created ads that were his own but looked like
AdSense ones.
He says it was his "first gallop into affiliate marketing"
and he began to bring in some bucks. But
because Gevirtz was on a "crummy ad network" he
was getting 1/10 of a click and giving them thousands
of clicks for $50-60 a day. "It was terrible but
I did not know any better."
His interest now piqued, Gevirtz started another
resource site that provides code generators like profile
tracker and layout generators for users to put graphics
on their MySpace pages. He moved to Yahoo Publisher
Networks and the ValueClick Networks and started
to make a lot more money.
By July and August of 2006, Gevirtz was looking
into ways that he could make money off of CPA instead
of CPC because he prefers the feeling of fulfilling
an acquisition – he doesn't like taking money for
a click. Gevirtz says that he once was accused of clicking
on his own ads and notes that "you can't be held
liable for click fraud if you are doing CPA stuff."
Although he does not want to reveal the specifics,
Gevirtz says that nowadays he runs a few interactive
websites, including graphic sites, which have thousands
of pages of content, and says he specializes in
things that target a younger audience. Because he is
a teen, he knows what teens find appealing, such as
ringtones and clothes.
He makes most of his income from CPA nowadays
and he focuses on landing pages, noting that in a few
years, "landing pages might be on phones." He says
he makes money with paid search and would like to
leverage mailing lists to promote offers but acknowledges,
"There are so many people like that already."
Last summer, Gevirtz hired developers to work on
his next big project, the details of which he is keeping
under wraps. He says the site is based on the idea that
"content is king" and it will be focused on getting users to create
the content. He hopes to have the main version of the site
done by this summer. He has a company with 38 employees
in India working on it – a company he found "after hours and
hours of Googling."
 Gevirtz's experience with outsourcing work to a company in
India has been very positive – he describes these Indian workers
as the most trustworthy people that he has ever worked
with – he continually is impressed by their eagerness and how
hard they labor to get a job done correctly. He feels good about
working with them – not just because they are "respectful and
honorable" – but because he literally is "helping them eat." No
doubt there have been "minor problems with the language barrier"
but they work through it – by communicating both on the
phone and through instant messenger.
Gevirtz blogs at his site, CPAShare.com, which he started
this past January, but acknowledges that he struggles to come
up with topics. He says that one of his goals is to get a user
base going and to get a site where other people are blogging
so that he can have mixed opinions – "it would be a portal for
e-marketers." He would like to drive more traffic to his site
and in fact, entitles one of his blog entries "Nobody Reads
This F---ing Thing."
A Day in the Life
Not surprisingly, Gevirtz lives at home with his family, in Santa
Barbara. He has an older sister, Eloise, who is 22; a little brother,
Harland, who's 10; and a 3-year-old sister name Madeline.
His California-born father is in finance and his French-born
mother is a part-time yoga teacher and full-time mom.
A typical day starts with Gevirtz "waking up 20 minutes
later than he should" – he has to get to school by 8:00 a.m.
and his mom takes him on the 20-minute drive. His first class
is science, followed by a class entitled "careers," then a graphic
design class, followed by English. He breaks for lunch, and then
it's on to math and the last class of the day, which is "stagecraft."
School ends at 2:49 p.m. – "not that [he is] watching the clock,"
he jokes.
He says he does "pretty well" in school, noting that he doesn't
skip class. He says he can't help but feel like he is rotting away
and wasting time during the school day because he would rather
be uploading his sites, emailing with affiliate managers or
working on some aspect of his business. He says he has a pretty
good relationship with most of his teachers, although his math
teacher does not like the fact that he text-messages in class.
At school, Gevirtz tries to keep his business endeavors on
the down-low – he believes his teachers would get irritated
and suspicious if they found out about his online dealings. Continued on Page 2...
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