

Automattic caught A/B testing pricing for Vaultpress - brianbreslin
http://brianbreslin.com/automattic-caught-ab-testing-pricing-for-vaultpress/

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ck2
This isn't "new" news, Matt revealed the A/B testing right here on HN quite
awhile back when I pointed out the price seemed high:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230679>

(over three months ago)

~~~
brianbreslin
ah. never saw that. thanks. kinda hard to keep track of everything said on HN
in the comments.

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maukdaddy
__* Page attempts to load malware __*

This site is linking to some shady shit. Some embedded page tries to load a
Java app from: extraditelbds.info

    
    
      Too many arguments supplied: {http:, -J-jar, -J\\extraditelbds.info\smb\new.avi, http://extraditelbds.info/e9t/l.php?i=2, none
    

Edit: Symantec claims this is:

    
    
      HTTP Phoenix Toolkit Executable Download

~~~
brianbreslin
any idea where to find that and how to remove it?

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maukdaddy
Search for every place where you're pulling in external content via
javascript, iframe, etc. Something that you're pulling content from has been
hacked or had malicious content injected.

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SecretAgentMan
Chrome threw a google malware warning for this site

~~~
brianbreslin
yeah i had a page hacked, but thought I had cleared it up. not seeing the
malware warning on safari or chrome on my end anymore.

I think its due to mediatemple hosting this and their servers being
compromised recently.
[http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=brianbres...](http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=brianbreslin.com)

~~~
paulgb
I didn't get a malware warning in chrome either. Did you have to do anything
to have it cleared from the malware databases, or did you just fix it and
wait?

~~~
brianbreslin
I fixed it. then went into webmaster tools and scanned the site, said no
problems found. I remember having to request a scan once before when another
site had been hacked.

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ganjianwei
I got the chance to hear Matt talk about this in person at my college. He said
what was really interesting was that what people fill in for what they would
pay in "a perfect world" is very strongly correlated to the price they're
offered.

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buro9
I'm not sure that's A/B testing really... they're asking a question and the
question is 'how much would you pay?'. And the way they've phrased it is to
include an example of what it _could_ be worth, and then you can ignore the
field (agree with that pricing) or enter your own suggestion.

It's A/B testing pricing when they actually offer different prices to person A
than person B, right now they're just asking a question and including in the
question an expectation setter. It's market research and not something dodgy.

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scottporad
I'm not sure I see a problem with this. Companies experiment with different
pricing all the time.

For example, you ever received a postcard from the cable or phone company with
a special offer? Do you think that all the customers get the same card?
No...they segment their customer groups to see what types offers work best.

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btilly
Amazon tried this a long time ago, and people were upset.

See [http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-
advertising/4188108-1.h...](http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-
advertising/4188108-1.html) for confirmation.

~~~
damoncali
What Amazon was doing was a little different. They were trying to figure out
how much people would pay based on available information that Amazon had. They
were actually figuring out how much a specific individual would pay for
something. Cool, but a little creepy.

This is just simple price testing and is done all the time with minimal
fanfare.

~~~
btilly
_What Amazon was doing was a little different. They were trying to figure out
how much people would pay based on available information that Amazon had._

Evidence, please.

My memory of the event, backed up by Amazon's statements in the link that I
provided, were that Amazon was randomly varying prices and no demographic
information was used to do so.

Now there were lots of people who thought that they might be doing something
more nefarious. But to the best of my knowledge, no evidence exists.
Furthermore my understanding of A/B testing and how Amazon runs A/B tests
makes Amazon's version of the story seem extremely reasonable.

~~~
damoncali
Just going off memory. Even if they were just varying prices randomly, the
resulting data set could (and I would guess would) be used to price
dynamically based on personal information. The difference is the possession of
personal data, which Amazon already had by the ton.

~~~
btilly
In that case I believe your memory is incorrect.

Furthermore my strong expectation is that they were using A/B tests to collect
data on the optimal price point to show everyone. I don't dispute that
eventually they likely would have gotten around to correlating geography and
price to be able to dynamically show the right price point, but there is
absolutely no reason to doubt their assertion that they hadn't done so, or to
believe that they had any near term plans to do so. (For one thing A/B tests
to try to figure out that level of detail are very difficult to do.)

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petercooper
FWIW, it was $30 when I went there a week ago. It looks like they're coming
down on the price somewhat. I thought $30/month to backup a blog was crazy at
the time.

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aresant
Price elasticity testing is about the simplest thing you can do to drive
substantial gains in profit - wrote up an article about this a while back
here:

[http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/06/one-simple-
secret-f...](http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/06/one-simple-secret-from-
an-1890-economist-nearly-doubles-website-profits/)

