How PissedConsumer.Com Taps Customer Outrage for 7 Figure Ad Profits

Has a business ever made you blind with fury?

Maybe you were deceptively billed.

Maybe they refused you a refund.

Or perhaps their wireless coverage is just iffy:

Nowadays when consumers get angry, many resort to the internet to channel their rage anonymously.

The website I’m profiling today warehouses that anger, slaps some AdSense ads on it, and is making an absolute killing.

What’s The Site?

The website is PissedConsumer.com and it ranks for nearly 1 million keywords:

How It Makes Money

You can see some sample ad placements on the screenshot below for their Meaningful Beauty page. Numbers 1 + 2, for example:

Number 3 showcases a handy knowledge box that aggregates reviewer information while also soliciting review submissions from customers.

The site thrives on user-generated content. As you scroll down the page, it has infinite load enabled so that more and more reviews load as you scroll down the page.

This helps to increase the page load speed, only serving user reviews when the reader nears the bottom of the page.

The more reviews the site gets, the more keywords it ranks for, the more traffic it gets and the more ads it can serve.

How Much Does It Make?

According to SimilarWeb, Pissed Consumer is averaging 1.72 million visits over the past six months.

The average visit duration at just under 2 minutes with the average pages per visit at 2.06.

If you wanted to calculate the monthly ad revenue, you could divide 1.72 Million by 1,000 (1,720), multiply that by 2.06 (3,543), and then multiply that by an estimated CPM like $10.

That would come to $35,432. It’s a ballpark number. But the site has been around for a long time- and has probably cracked a million dollars in earnings over its lifetime.

Keyword Research

I used Ahrefs (you can also use SEMrush to do the same research- click the link to access a 2-week free trial just for my readers) to extract their top 1,000 organic keywords:

Content themes

Pissed Consumer ranks for several distinct types of keywords if you evaluate the keyword research table above.

They will rank for:

1. brand terms like “carefree dental”;
2. customer service queries like “radiant revive phone number”;
3. lawsuit searches like “clear choice lawsuit”;
4. complaint and scam searches like “national american miss scam”,
5. and common ‘review’ type searches like “xstrands review”.

Pissed Consumer Competitors

Ahrefs Also provided a handy overview of Pissed Consumer’s top organic competitors.

The biggest of the bunch is the Better Business Bureau, followed up by Crunchbase, Trustpilot and Consumer Affairs.

What I would do

If I were entering into this niche, obviously I couldn’t expect user-generated content right off the bat…

Keyword Research

What I would do to start is focus on keyword research. I would use Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze the organic keyword rankings of a site like Pissed Consumer, or one in the competitor’s comparison table, and begin picking off some of the best opportunities to create content for.

User-Generated Content Tech

I would also research user submission plugins / WordPress directory themes and figure out how I could begin soliciting user reviews of companies and translating that into structured data much the same way Pissed Consumer does.

Maybe a plugin like User Submitted Posts could be adapted to this purpose.

Solicit Reviews

You could also hire a virtual assistant or a Twitter bot to solicit company reviews.

Maybe you can search out customers on social media and send them a link to a form where they could provide a review on your website for free.

Or maybe offer an incentive like entry into a raffle for an iPad.

If you look on Twitter, for example, a lot of people have some harsh criticism for My Pillow:

Alright Twitter peeps. I’m a pillow diva and still searching for the one.

Anyone (side sleepers especially) have any recommendations?

(If you’re going to reply with MyPillow, please don’t bother. It’s my current pillow and it sucks)

— Adam (@JohnnyNuck) June 25, 2019

Here’s the tea, I met the mypillow guy one time and he was a complete dick, his pillows suck too so idk y y’all hyped him up so much

— Madison Neeley (@mmneeley14) July 19, 2019

This is not a political statement. My husband bought me a MyPillow last year. It sucks. It was a waste of money. I put it on the floor for my cats to use. They don't. https://t.co/GuYW3Klpzc

— Stacy Wescoe (@morestacy) April 4, 2018

I would have writers create content about the companies- you’ll need some on-page text to get the ball rolling with user-generated content.

You could write a couple hundred words about the company, Wikipedia-style. You could also rewrite existing customer complaints to increase the word count. I would play around with different word count lengths.

Maybe aiming for a thousand words apiece to start. As a first pass, I’d try to get 50 posts published within three months or so, monitoring the organic keyword positions with Ahrefs or SEMrush.

I would supplement the content with some guest post outreach which can be outsourced to services like DFY Links or Authority Builders. Once you have some content and some links, traffic will be a matter of time and luck.

What I Like

User-Generated Content

A site like this thrives on user-generated content.

Disgruntled consumers flock to the internet to express their outrage and Pissed Consumer capitalizes on their often incoherent wrath.

Awesome On-Page Experience

Pissed Consumer also does an awesome job with on-page user engagement and on-page SEO.

Each of these company complaint landing pages is thoughtfully designed and helpfully aggregates useful information near the top of the page in their company knowledge box.

Is able to compile a significant amount of information about companies.

In the screenshot I provided for Meaningful Beauty, you can see aggregated user reviews, number of issues that have been resolved, the total number of reviews, the claimed losses, and even customer support contact information.

What I Don’t Like

User-Generated Content Issues

As with any user-generated content, you are going to get a lot of weird and crazy submissions. Check this user review of Nordstrom out – a ‘pissed consumer’ wishes death on the brand:

I would be concerned about legal liabilities. What if you end up getting sued by a company like Nordstrom’s for hosting defamatory content? I’m not an expert in these matters but it feels really dicey.

In addition, because so much of the site’s content is user-generated, you’re going to rank for some weird keywords.

For example, their 5th best keyword, as of July 2019, is ‘swinger zone central’ an adult ‘swinger’ website:

I’ve seen this phenomenon occur over and over especially with scraper sites.

They end up ranking for the least difficult keywords and many of them are keywords no one would ever think, or want, to optimize for.

It’s another downside to a site like this- user-generated content means that you don’t really control the type of traffic you get.

Ad Eligibility?

It’s difficult enough nowadays to get into ad networks like AdSense, but sites like these that rely on scraped information and user-generated content can be more difficult to get approved.

Summing Up

I like how uncompetitive the keywords are in this niche, but I’d be wary of warehousing so many negative, potentially defamatory, company reviews on my website.

As you can imagine, the people most motivated to review a company on a website like this are those who feel they have been wronged by the business.

Perhaps you can balance it out by soliciting positive reviews, as well- employing a Twitter bot to automatically solicit feedback.

Last Updated on June 16, 2020 by Ryan Nelson