
What happened to Priceonomics? - Danieru
http://danieru.com/2013/10/22/what-happened-to-priceonomics/
======
rohin
Hi, I'm a co-founder of Priceonomics. Basically we started seeing more
traction from two things (that weren't our consumer price guide).

First, the traffic from our blog was dwarfing the traffic (and engagement) on
our price guide. We originally started our blog just to get links to drive SEO
to our price guide. But, it turns out we love blogging so we really put our
hearts into it.

Second, we started getting a lot more revenue from helping companies acquire
and structure data than we were making from the price guide. All those blog
posts we write were we crawl the web and do analysis based on the data? That
was testing this out. We'll be writing more about that soon, so stay tuned.

The result is that we decided to focus on helping businesses get data and
writing about data via our blog. About a month ago we started depreciating the
consumer price guide.

Happy to answer any questions!

~~~
beerglass
_deprecating_

~~~
nonchalance
the article used the cringeworthy misspelling homogenious

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nostromo
This is a difficult space.

I started a similar company, Shopobot. We launched, raised, got good press.
Things looked great!

Shortly after we watched as Decide and Priceonomics launched.

After months of beating our head against the wall, we came to the conclusion
that we weren't competing against Decide and Priceonomics. We were competing
against Amazon.

Everyone we talked to loved the idea. But we found their praise didn't turn
into clicks. We'd ask them why, and they'd always say, "oh, I just went to
Amazon."

One day our lead dev was telling me about a recent purchase and I asked him if
he used our site to find a good price. "No, I just used Amazon. I have Prime."
That's when I knew we were fucked. Competing against Amazon without a really
really strong value prop is not easy.

We've long since pivoted, Decide shut down, and now Priceonomics is perhaps
pivoting. I think CamelCamelCamel is still at it! After all the VC money
flushed out, the bootstrapper is still standing. :)

This reminds me, I have a long blog post to finish about how comparison
shopping and price guides are difficult to pull off.

~~~
meritt
There's still a lot of value for pricing intelligence (see current #3 post
talking about Amazon's Fulfillment-By-Amazon product) in arbitrage. The
"shipped by amazon" has an immense amount of weight. It's pretty
straightforward to acquire products (even from amazon 3rd party sellers),
relist on amazon with FBA/prime/etc logos and profit.

Although Amazon has started it to do it themselves directly via "Amazon
Warehouse Deals" \--
[http://www.amazon.com/b?node=1267877011](http://www.amazon.com/b?node=1267877011)
\-- They'll actually purchase other seller's underpriced inventory and relist
it themselves for a tidy profit. Especially easy when it's sitting in their
warehouse already in a box.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is a great "anecdote" (I don't have a better word...). It's easy to
imagine someone finding cheap goods, setting himself up with fulfillment by
amazon, and setting a price, and then Amazon deciding his price is wrong,
buying his stuff, and relisting it (after all, it's already catalogued in
their warehouse) themselves.

I don't think anyone thinks such behavior would be morally alarming... but
that's certainly a common perspective when it comes to high-frequency stock
trading. What makes the difference?

~~~
wtracy
1\. Normal people don't have access to HFT equipment, giving a handful of
corporations an edge over the rest of us. 2\. Most people really don't
understand HFT.

I think #2 is actually the real reason people are up in arms about HFT,
honestly. It's new, scary, and allows corporations to extract money seemingly
from nowhere.

~~~
caf
I think the _" extract money seemingly from nowhere"_ might be the operative
part here - one thing that almost everyone shares is an instinctive
understanding that money does _not_ come from nowhere. In the absence of
further information, many will be suspicious that it's probably coming from
themselves.

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fusionflo
Interestingly, my co-founder and I always still fell into the trap of
purchasing something on the net and within a few days seeing the product for a
whole bunch less. About a year ago, we set about building a tool that would
"monitor/watch" the prices on our behalf and we wanted it to work on any
shopping site.

A few month ago, we launched Pricify [http://pricify.com](http://pricify.com)
and this is our first iteration. Basically, you can use a simple bookmarklet
to add products to pricify from any online store, once the product drops in
price the system sends you an email or facebook notification, if at any point
the product hits it all time lowest price it sends you a separate email as
well.

Last week we had a guy who bought a car as a result of the price drop he
noticed and contact us to thank us. This has provided us further confidence of
its use.

We've learnt so much already and are adding what our users are asking for.
Ultimately, we want to build something that solved a problem for us in the
hope that it solves the problem for others, so far we have been seeing
promising results.

We want to get into the content, blogging from a SEO perspective, but we've
had very limited bandwidth trying to focus on the main functionality itself
being completely bootstrapped!

Early days, but would love any advice on whats already being learnt from the
others out here.

~~~
talkingquickly
We built this for clothes ([http://www.shopofme.com](http://www.shopofme.com))
a while ago. It did some fashion specific stuff on top of it but in essence
the same principal, alerts when items drop in price.

Might be interesting to chat as I'm still running the site as a side project
these days after the primary business model didn't work out. We built a fair
bit of pretty solid tech for it so might at least be some knowledge share
there? Contact details in profile.

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Danieru
Wow my post hit the frontpage! This gives me a fine chance to see happens to
an uncached wordpress blog behind Nginx and php5-fpm. So far no explosions.

Now I realize the guys behind priceonomics might read this I hope they take it
well. I liked their early blog posts, those were interesting!

This homepage makes me concerned that the original business plan is not
working out. It feels like they are resorting, or pivoting, to a classical
product recommendation site. I hope this is not the case. Maybe I just hit a
bad combination of randomized A/B tests.

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diziet
I hope priceonomics is doing well and do not get acquired like Decide.com did
by ebay: [https://medium.com/on-startups/d74efec8b1a8](https://medium.com/on-
startups/d74efec8b1a8)

Unfortunately I know them mostly from their blog and not their product.

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ramykhuffash
I noticed this a while back. I'm guessing their blogging efforts were so
successful, they decided to make it the focus and become a media business. I
too would love to hear what's going on behind the scenes at Priceonomics.

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AznHisoka
Simple. They've built what search engines want vs what humans wanted: content
that will rank in the search engines and get more shares/clicks. Thin product
comparison pages no longer rank well and even worse a lot of them may give the
signal that you're not a quality site.

Sometime this year or last, these guys probably looked at their traffic growth
and realized this existing model was never going to cut it. Their sole
strategy is search engine traffic and their pages were not ranking.

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dmazin
I guess it's telling that I was surprised by this because I always thought
Priceonomics was a blog so interesting as to get YC funding.

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poissonpie
The trouble is, although OP believes Priceonomics should be solving his
particular pain point, they clearly aren't in the business of "solving" it
anymore. They are in the business of making money and if their site has
downgraded your particular use case, it means, ceteris paribus, that it just
wasn't making money for them.

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mugenx86
The business model of Pricenomics seems to be that of placing more power in
the hands of the consumer, increasing buyer bargaining power. This is what
many vendors, especially tech vendors such as Apple/Google try to avoid.
Product release cycles are kept secret for good reason.

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Hawkee
I figured this was a result of their use of Craigslist data. The best part
about Priceonomics is the ability to find the average selling price of an item
on Craigslist. I figured Craigslist sent them a C&D, so they buried the
search.

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ankgyl
If you liked the original concept of priceonomics, you might like this:
[http://www.pricemachine.com/](http://www.pricemachine.com/)

(Disclosure: I work for the company behind this website)

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uts_
This post may shed some light:
[https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392](https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392)

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ivanbrussik
what the heck! this is preposterous. i wonder what "seo genius" decided that
this was a good idea. hmmm lets totally get rid of the #1 reason why users hit
our site and replace it with "seo friendly" articles.

edit: and im not saying that having a blog is bad, but to completely hide the
main functionality of the site just doesnt make any sense.

