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The Media Desk
If you are of a certain age, you may remember being at your grandmother's house when the mail came. And there might be a colorful oversized envelope that, when opened, was full of large sheets of stickers, and perhaps a game of sorts where you had to find the sticker with a wheelbarrow full of apples and put it on the correct spot on the game card to be eligible to win an extra prize.
What amazed this writer was the names of the magazines on those large sheets of rather small stickers. They had magazines, quite literally, on every topic from A to Z. Travel, and cars, and boats, and sports, and home gardening and on and on. Every individual hobby had at least one periodical, and if you couldn't find it, there was one for the general hobbyist. And then the cooking, and eating, magazines, and after you ate too much, there was a selection about diet and exercise. And did you see the ones about wildlife, and dinosaurs for kids?
Sometimes there were sticker sheets of books available, or even newspaper format publications that you could subscribe to. All you had to do was to cut out the sticker of the magazine or book and put it on the order form and send it back in. Oh, and don't forget to complete the game card as well, you could win a nice prize.
That's why the outfit that put the stickers in the envelope was called "Publishers Clearing House", they represented publications that some people may never see, unless they spent a lot of time digging through the far corners of the racks at a newstand. And even then, you might miss the one about garden railroading layouts.
And then a couple of months later, another envelope would appear, with perhaps a different selection of magazines. And, oh, look, there's a quarterly one about the places and cuisine of the Greek Islands. And, of course, a different game card, this time you have to find the three stickers that complete the picture of the covered bridge.
Oh, and in this envelope there's a few fliers for some merchandise. You can get a special Christmas ornament, or maybe a kitchen measuring cup with a strainer lid, or a sewing kit with a special section to keep spare buttons from getting away.
That was then.
My, how times have changed.
Your grandmother wouldn't recognize that organization now. In fact, you may not. And what's worse, it appears that the company as a unit is circling the drain in some sort of long format exit dance.
Do you recall the ads that were everywhere with a well known celebrity offering to award a prize of thousands of dollars a week for life? Maybe you saw the commercials a few years ago with the "Prize Patrol"? The pretty woman with the big check and the three suit wearing guys with the big smiles and the balloons and flowers getting out of the specially painted van, with a TV crew in tow? Well, the patrol is down to only two of the guys, and the celebrity is nowhere to see seen on the site. There is even an official statement on the company's LinkedIn page about how the pretty woman is no longer affiliated with the company.
The PCH.com website used to have a website "frontpage" with videos, the news, and even the weather on it. You could watch a clip of a bear playing with its birthday cake, and then check the basketball playoff scores, and maybe catch up on what happened on Wall Street yesterday. And there was a regular show that starred some of the Prize Patrol that talked about special offers and promotions in an entertaining way that would be on the front page. As well as an extensive menu of links to all of their other internal pages and subdomains. Not any more. Any link to the "frontpage" now simply goes to what used to be an internal page where you can check your state lottery's numbers, the rest of that content is gone.
If you remember "Publishers Clearing House" fondly, you may not wish to accept the following challenge: Use the search engine of your choice to find their primary website, they have several customer facing pages, but one is at least nominally their 'main' site. Go to it, and try to buy a magazine, or a book, or even a Christmas ornament or measuring cup.
While their shopping pages were never searchable... no, you couldn't type "cookbooks", "housewares" or "gifts for a woman" into a search field and have a display of a couple of dozen results come back. Their shopping pages were always a handful of pages of a dozen or so items each, more or less at random, with your canister set followed by cat toys and then a woman's nightgown, and then below that was a car emergency kit and a child's fishing pole. Even holiday themed offerings were interspersed with children's toys and garden items. Whether you wanted to see them or not, and that cookbook you saw last week may never reappear.
You may be surprised to find out that they no longer offer anything for sale. Nothing. No gift items, no horse racing magazines, no monthly tourism tabloids from Canada. Nada. Ziltch.
What began as the magazine sales company is now heavily involved with "PCH Media", and has totally changed their focus and is now about something they call "multi-channel marketing". The most dramatic changes coming within the last year.
Even while at the bottom of several of the internal pages on the website you see a menu bar that still says "magazines", the link takes you to a "daily play" page, not to a selection of periodicals. The PCH overview page still says they combine "digital entertainment and direct-to-consumer marketing and commerce". Except the 'commerce' side of the equation has gone away. As is stated on their "Frequently Asked Questions" page:
"What happened to the Mailings and Merchandise Offers?"
"Due to factors that include rising postal and shipping costs, PCH has decided to discontinue our direct mail promotions and the merchandise sales portion of our business."
FAQ page on PCH.com (see link below)
But there is a common theme before and after, and sometimes during, every game: Advertising.
They send out emails reminding you to come play a game, and at the bottom of the email, is an ad. Something, the entire email, "here's something you should see", is an ad. Other emails have an urgent flag on them with the dramatic subject line "important alert issued" or "time for action", to get you to come get an entry in a game you have already played that day. But the links will take you to a page that says "check out this exciting offer", and play a video ad. And they send out A LOT of emails, during the production of this essay the Desk kept track: Monday was seven, Tuesday there was nine. And a similar number on Wednesday. And the majority of them had identical or similar subject lines that the emails they sent out last week had, including warnings about failing to fulfill a requirement, or to register for something, or whatever, which had been done before the last warning was sent.
Something else is that they assume you have a broadband connection and a computer and web browser that has nothing else to do than to allow their video ads to auto play. See the article below about why auto play videos are still in use if EVERYBODY despises them.
Some of the videos have a skip button that works. Some of the videos have a button in the same position and color of the 'skip' button, but instead, it takes you to the advertiser's site. And some are must play ads and the only way to stop it... the most infamous was the "skin talk" ad with a pretty girl and a moron that ran for three minutes... the only way to stop it was to close the window it was playing in. Most have sound, and some of them have sound that is apparently designed solely to get you to mute your speakers. Which works!
You'll soon notice that the game pages are overrun with things the industry calls "arbitrage ads" which are those terrible boxes that promise you something of interest, which may even be true, but you end up clicking through nineteen pages of nonsense, and ads, before you ever see anything related to it. There's a link to more about those from the famous Snopes.com below.
One of the ads the Desk checked for this article was posted on the site by the outbrain service, which then sells the ad space to the rest of the world. It is this third party content, ads not directly contracted or vetted by the host website, that can be a major security problem and a source of all sorts of cookies, malware, and other problems for the host site's customers. And it isn't just outbrain that does that, taboola, and google ads are also all over the game pages, with even more outside advertising.
Back to the clickbait ad, the Desk clicked it, we wanted to know about this:
And it is worse on mobile without their app. With most of the games you'll play on your phone that way, the ads load on top of the game, and the microscopic 'x' button to close it is all but impossible to hit every time and you end up with your phone's memory full of junk.
Not all of the ads are clickbait of course. There are those that are for real products and services, cars and shampoo and even office space. Do you need a card reader for your store, here's an ad for one, did you know that winter is coming and your tires are worn out? and then the City of Cleveland is open for tourists to visit, once you put new tires on your car that is. Or perhaps you were looking for a soul mate, or even new carpet for your house. Or not.
The variety of advertisers that support the games is just as astonishing as the array of magazines they used to sell.
But thereby comes the rub.
This isn't your grandmother's "envelope full of stickers" company any more.
The only thing they now sell is information.
Your information to be precise, to whichever of these advertisers is willing to pay for it. That includes the info from your profile, and the random questions you may answer that pop up on the site (sometimes for a small token reward), as well as the information they can glean by your use of the site, such as what device you are on, and when are you there, how long you stay, what you do, which ad did you see, did you hover your mouse over any of them while you read about the Beverly Hills MD, and so on. There is eight categories of external parties who they disclose information to, and then they have a list of others who work with them they may get it as well. See their privacy page for more.
And that doesn't even count a very nearly constant push for you to answer questions and surveys from their partners. And there is a very good reason for that....
They need you to not only see the ads, and some web advertising is billed by the 'exposure', how many times the ad loaded in a human's browser over a given period of time, they need you to click on them. Or in some cases, just hover your cursor (your mouse pointer) over them.... which is why some ads seem to be intentionally placed and programmed to cover the content which you are actually there to see. And even better, there will be ads, that cover other ads, in some cases, the ads may end up being three layers deep, which means you can't see all of two of them.
The company in their background information to potential advertisers talks about how they have "38 million registered and identified users". That's a lot of people, and the company claims that they are "100 percent permissioned and privacy compliant". Full text available at pchmedia.com, see link below.
Which essentially means that if you play their games, and are trying to win their prizes, they can sell every bit of information they can mine out of you to the highest bidder. And yes, they talk about data mining, except now it is called "data enrichment" and profile building, which is on their "our solutions" page as well.
Which brings us to their mobile app.
It is one of those that is always on, whether you are actively using it or not... which your battery will just love! It tracks your use of other aps, purchases, and even location. Their user agreement is an interesting read and is available on the websites that offer the app for download.
Why would the venerable magazine sales company need to use pushy and even aggressive ads formats toward their customers? Why would a company that used to brag about giving away "superprizes" of tens of millions of dollars, or one of multiple thousands of dollars a week "for life", suddenly pull back and have the largest prize on the site of 'only' one and a half million dollars.
Well, one reason is based in a spot of legal trouble PCH found itself in awhile back.
In June of 2023 the company settled a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission about how PCH had conducted its online business. As a result the company had to "make substantial changes to how it conducts business online." See FTC information page and a related item linked below.
Apparently the changes we have documented above are part of the ones agreed to in the settlement.
And it hasn't been for the best.
By one website traffic analysis service, the overall PCH.com domain had just over 700,000 "organic" visits in their reporting period ("organic traffic" means they have used various metrics to determine whether a given visitor is a human or a web-crawling bot of some description). Two other checkers showed a monthly average of around 450,000 into the top level of the site, one of those was for five months.
Still another that tracked last month's traffic against a similar period last year, found the inbound traffic down by over twenty-five percent.
One of the problems was definitely encountered during the production of this essay.
While the Desk has several different laptops in service, running operating systems ranging from XP to Eleven, and it routinely uses browsers ranging from the one that came with the antique OS, to the terrible "G" word's browser on the new one. It also uses things like Firefox, Opera, and even Yandex's browser. Some of which habitually block third party cookies and most ads.
PCH.com is allergic to ad and tracker blocking software.
Most of the Desk's browsers have had the settings changed to NOT allow videos to auto play, and even blocks some animations and 3D stuff, some more successfully than others.
PCH.com really wants you to see auto play video ads and such while they "get you in on the winning".
While the company says they have over 38,000,000 registered users, evidently a lot of them have either "shuffled off the mortal coil" or have otherwise stopped visiting the site to play games, and see ads, on a regular basis.
Many newer browsers block third party anything as a security measure against malware and identity theft. Some browsers stop any video with sound from playing. Others will ask if you want to see an animated image. And so on. As internet users have gotten somewhat more sophisticated, they have gotten tired of being bombarded by annoyances like autoplay videos and ads that talk to them.
While the company uses behavioral tracking (which games you play, which surveys you answer, how long you watch which video, etc), and you have already given up some information in your profile (age, home town, level of education, and so on), your behavior over time on the site can shed even more light one which products or services you may be interested in, and certain boffins in the bowels of various data analysis sites can even determine which sort of vacation you might be most interested in next year, which is why you'll see ads for Florida instead of Cancun in the coming months.
But people like to win prizes, right? And if they are "in it to win it" as many of them claim on the company's various social media accounts say, then they are willing to put up with a good amount of annoyance while they're playing the games. And, to be honest, some of the games are fun, the constant barrage of ads, some of which cover part of the game, or interrupt a game in progress, and MUST be allowed to load and run before the game will load and run, and even with the game the Desk likes, a minute version of Mahjongg for instance, the interruptions get old quickly. And, as we mentioned with the browsers with built in blocking software, the Mahjongg game will not work, and the site will nag you about it. So anybody with a new computer using one of the newer browsers, which may not let you disable some of the malware blocking features, the games may not run. And if you can't play the games on this site, you may find someplace else with games you can play. Such as some of the casinos that run ads on PCH.com.
While the key demographic for the company has always skewed a bit toward the grandparents of the world than to their college cheerleader granddaughter, there was enough diversity among their players to attract a range of advertisers, all of which pay to be seen. Well, perhaps the wifi signal at the rest home isn't strong enough to allow a lot of game play..... you never know. Right?
So now we have several reasons why the company that had previously had a nationwide sweepstakes offering a fifteen million dollar prize, and another for either five thousand or seven thousand dollars a week, now offers a fraction of that.
The first being that their own policy changes have taken a sizable number of their customers out of the game. Those that occasionally bought whatever it may be from them, and they did have some items and periodicals that you couldn't find anywhere else easily, are now shopping elsewhere. As to whether that is the direct impact of changes in their efforts as a result of the FTC case or not is best left to history to judge.
The other factor is the change in the online market. Part of that change is seen in those ads we 'didn't mention' earlier. Real online casinos that can pay out in money, not tokens. Many of the ads that were all over the PCH.com site were for what was effectively websites that were in direct competition for game players, with the incentive that at the end of the day, your "bank" is made up of points that can be converted to real dollars and paid out to your Paypal or similar account. While the legality of some aspects of online gaming may be still being worked out in various legislatures, there is no lack of them in the online world.
Another factor is that the PCH.com staff worked hard to innovate itself into that same obscurity that Myspace.com is now in. And it continues to do so. That "frontpage" that we mentioned is no more. Their "search and win" began returning more sponsored links than it did results, and most of them had nothing to do with what was being searched for. And some of the menus and even games were simply incompatible with some browsers, even without various malware barriers, they were programmed to work in a given format, and if you had anything else, sorry. Which means if you went to the 'three line' menu on the right side of the top banner, you could see various options, features, and subdomains, but when you tried to click on them, the link went away.
And something that cannot be overlooked is the annoyance factor with the ads. You cannot make a move on the site without an ad getting in the way. And some of them both cover content and when you try to close it, it takes you to their site. Which simply counts as a paid click for the company. But if you're desperate for 'clicks', which eventually translates into dollars, you take what you can get, any way you can get it. Until you can't.
Time for some sort of conclusion.
While the name "Publishers Clearing House" still has value. And its "Prize Patrol" was famous enough to become the subject of several comedy bits on various TV shows. The company needed to be good stewards of them, and maintain whatever integrity it had as the premier American sweepstakes house. The FTC settlement seems to have drained whatever will to continue that the company had, while in the face of a changing population, increasing competition, and even further scrutiny from various officials, and now, it appears to be trying to reinvent itself.
And, as other companies have taken a similar path, many have gone down the tubes...."can you say 'Saturn Automotive' boys and girls?" ....
While the envelope full of stickers company has changed, and can never change back, it may be able to pull itself out of the death spiral it seems to be in and, once again, surprise people with a big check and a handful of flowers.
LINKS and Resources:
Outside links will open in a new tab/window. All links were working as of date of original posting.
"PCH Media is the only data-driven media company powered by an iconic sweepstakes and entertainment brand and fueled by a 100% authenticated, permissioned audience. We offer future-proofed marketing solutions that help brands, agencies, and tech partners accurately identify and interact with qualified users to achieve efficiency."https://www.pchmedia.com/
Snopes Tips: How To Avoid Ad Arbitrage Clickbait:and a long list of them that weren't just ads:
"Ad arbitrage" is when website owners create stories that are broken up into multiple pages, place ads on them, and reap profits off the ads that appear on the many pages."
https://www.snopes.com/articles/387913/avoid-ad-arbitrage-clickbait/
TheMediaDesk.comNOTE: The above editorial is wholly and solely based on the observations and research by TheMediaDesk, which does occasionally play some of the games on PCH.com, and has won a few small prizes, but does NOT have their app on its phone. This article is not endorsed or approved of by anybody or anything else, including PCH. Other conclusions may be reasonably drawn from the events referenced, and you are welcome to do so at your leisure.