* They seem to make a good amount of money selling leads (for example to moving companies, consolidations loans, etc).
* They drive traffic through SEM, but this has proven difficult recently because Google drives down Quality Scores for lead-gen and affiliate sites (I believe they call them non-value-add sites) which has made it harder and harder to stay profitable and competitive with original vendors.
* It's hard to get much traction in other channels (SEO, Affiliates, Media) -- so they tend to be dangerously tied to one marketing vehicle -- Google SEM.
* The whole area seems to have a bit of shady undertone to it, and I'm not sure my friend really gets much satisfaction out of it -- he'll probably be leaving shortly even though the pay is good.
Apparently the SEM->Coreg model works very well, and some are making millions in profit off the scheme, but completely agree about the shady undertone.
I had been independently trying to see if I could invent a way to make it less shady / spammy. No success yet, all the players in this area seem to be hellbent on hoodwinking folks with funneling tricks...
1) Convince Google and the web generally you are value-add somehow (say, by having detailed reviews).
2) My partner recently entered my phone number for a moving quote from one of these sites. Huge mistake - we got dozens of calls from different companies. Obviously this is what will kill the industry - there are a lot of suckers but eventually people will learn. If you could make this process more transparent and protect the end user, perhaps users would come back and you wouldn't be so tied to acquisition channels. (Sorta like an Angie's List but where the company pays instead of the user.)
Shoot me an email at juliuss@gmail.com if you want their actual website to check out. I wouldn't want to post their name publicly unless he said it was ok. (I get a feeling nobody in this space wants anyone else to know what they're up to.)