Canadian Fintech Affiliate: Hardbacon stops sizzling 🥓
My thoughts on Hardbacon's recent bankruptcy, slow month for updates, and two big conferences for financial affiliates in the South🥵
Morning!
Welcome to the Canadian Fintech Affiliate newsletter, a monthly roundup of industry news, offer updates and conferences worth attending for Canadian affiliate marketers.
In today’s email:
Offer updates: AMEX sunsets a business card, HISA rates decrease
Insights: Breaking down Hardbacon’s recent bankruptcy
Best conferences in Toronto, Atlanta, San Antonio and Vegas
Opinions expressed are my own*
Today’s reading time is 7 minutes.
🤑 Offer updates
American Express sunsets the AMEX Business Edge credit card
Savings account rate decreases across the board. In line with BoC decreasing their key interest rate. Expect more of these as frequent rate cuts are expected over the next 12 months
After being declared not ‘Helpful’ by Google, Hardbacon declares bankruptcy
A few days after I published last month’s newsletter, Julien Brault the CEO of Hardbacon penned a letter declaring that Hardbacon is ceesing operations and has declared bankruptcy.
Having watched from the sidelines, it seemed that this was likely if there wasn’t an extreme rebound in traffic.
In his letter he states that after his business changed after the Google update in September 2023 decimated his organic traffic.
“In total, we lost 97% of our traffic from Google. This means our traffic went from 350,000 per month in September to around 50,000 per month at the time of writing.”
Even though Hardbacon is a direct competitor to Finder, you never want to see another publisher go out of business. If anything you want the opposite.
In the affiliate business in Canada, we’re competing against Google and Facebook for ad budget more than we’re competition against other publishers.
The more publishers in the space means more total referral volume for banks and large FIs, bringing bigger budgets to channel.
That’s what we need in Canada.
Background on Hardbacon
Originally launched in 2017 as a budgeting app where you could connect your bank account and external accounts to track your spending and networth, they pivoted their focus to their growth on organic traffic with monetization through affiliate partnerships around 2020.
They raised several rounds of capital including an 820k round on frontfundr in 2022 and hired a team of inhouse writers to publish content covering investing, credit cards, loans, insurance and many other financial verticals.
At the time of the 2022 frontfundr round, they had ~1,450 articles live and were planning on 45% of the funds towards content creation.
After the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 they started culling articles and making major content improvements hoping to rebound in the subsequent updates - as evidenced by the greendots in the screenshots in my last newsletter.
That rebound never happened - with the exception of the slight bounce back in August 2024.
What led to the decrease in traffic?
When the Helpful Content Update started rolling out in September 2023, it was designed to combat the new wave of AI content and sites that were over optimized to rank in search.
There was also a factor of monetization strategy. Sites that monetized through affiliate partnerships (both big and small) were targeted.
A few thoughts I have on their UI👇
Sticky offer wall in the sidebar
This is a standard feature in a lot of Wordpress website themes but you don’t see them on many of the big comparison sites any more. If their bounce rate was a factor, I could see this contributing to users returning to Google.
I’d remove it entirely OR have max 3 products in the sidebar and make it static, not sticky. Once the user scrolls past the offers, they’re gone from their screen.
Too many partner links
Looking at their best credit cards page they have a very detailed write up of their pick for the best cards in Canada are by category and why.
The content is probably too long, once we get past a top 10 list the paradox of choice comes in and it’s difficult for someone to make a decision but overall it’s good quality.
What catches my eye is the amount of partner links in the article.
When I land on the page, immediately above the fold are 3 offers in the side bar. Then I scroll down to read about Neo a CTA to apply for Neo and below that they have contextual links for different Neo products and a link to sign up for lounge access through Priority Pass with Awin.
Within the first 200 words of a 2500 word article I’m presented with ~13 links for affiliate offers.
It doesn’t exactly scream ‘trust’.
I’d remove the sidebar as mentioned above, remove all contextual linkouts and only use these ‘placements’ for internal links and trim the overall number of best categories to 10.
I’d bet they made $0 from that Awin link.
Goal would be to reduce the total number of linkouts from the page and focus the traffic to the few products that convert.
Keyword and link stuffing in the footer
It’s common to include a partial with similar articles at the bottom of a page or links in the footer that the user might find helpful. The goal is to keep the reader on your site, reduce bounce rate and hopefully have them take action on a product recommendation or sign up for your newsletter.
The issue with their strategy is that they’ve over complicated it. They have 3 different content recomendations. If I were Google, I’d be questioning if this is ‘helpful content’ or trying to over optimize especially since many of the recommendations don’t meet the immediate intent of the audience.
For example, someone reading about credit card points isn't interested in investment calculators at that moment.
Instead, I’d focus on 1 feature that would yield the best experience or remove it altogether. For credit card pages, I’m only recommending similar credit card articles.
Who’s likely to buy the Hardbacon assets
With all the content that’s live and the app infrastructure they’ve built, I think there’s value to be had for a company that’s looking for a shortcut to content creation or looking to build out an app for their existing customers/members.
By acquiring the asstest you skip the research, drafting, writing and proofing process and go straight to the editing process. You can keep the authorship as well which is valuable as they had quality writers with authority in Canada.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no work to be done. With the content not currently ranking, you’d need to have a review and improvement process in place to get that content in the SERPs. This means going page by page.
And that’s a lot work.
Their biggest advantage is they have content in French and English which could be divided and sold separately. With their strong presence in QC, I can see a French language company seriously considering their French content, possibly for internal purposes.
Closing thoughts
Ultimately, I think they were trying to do too much - app, content, 18 niches, managing sub affiliates etc - and when traffic dropped they were left scrambling. This was probably expedited by the decision to raise capital.
This is a wild guess but they probably should have commanded higher payouts from partners.
Through my own failures, I’ve learned that focus and simplicity can be a superpower.
Straight up, hats off to Julien Brault for building Hardbacon. He grinded for 7 years building the company and pivoting multiple times which is incredibly difficult.
He raised multiple rounds at an $11 million valuation for an affiliate site in Canada 🤯
Julien, if you’re reading this I hope you feel proud of what you’ve accomplished over the last 7 years. Though its not the ending you hoped for the Canadian affiliate space is in a better place because of Hardbacon.
When you do decide on your next company, just let me pick the name, ok?
🍸Conferences
Upcoming conferences worth checking out:
Finder presents: The Finance Affiliate Club
Finder Canada’s FAC event will be held in Toronto this September. Being our first event, this will be an invite-only event🤫
Reply to this email if you’re interested in attending the next event.
CardCon - San Antonio, September 24- 26, 2024
Biggest dedicated credit card affiliate event in the US. Meet top FIs and financial creators/affiliates promoting cards
Rakuten Dealmaker - September 26-27 2024 | Toronto, Canada
Rakuten’s in-house conference. If you want to meet with TD/MBNA or CIBC credit cards, check this out.
FinCon - Atlanta, October 23-26, 2024
Anyone talking money and personal finance will be at this event.
Money20/20 - October 27-30 2024 | Las Vegas, NV
The heavy hitters of finance will be at this event. If you want to speak to the CMO of a major FI, this could be the conference for you. At $3,799 per pass, you better close to make it worth it.
