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Automattic caught A/B testing pricing for Vaultpress
- SecretAgentMan 16y agoChrome threw a google malware warning for this site
- brianbreslin 16y agoyeah 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=brianbreslin.com http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=brianbres...
- paulgb 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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.
- SecretAgentMan 16y agoIt's cleared up for me too. Interesting find - thanks!
- mttravis 16y agoWere you able to get the hack cleared up? If not, please contact us and let us know.
- ck2 16y agoI get a warning about novelounge or something like that.
- ck2 16y agoThis 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230679 (over three months ago)
- brianbreslin 16y agoah. never saw that. thanks. kinda hard to keep track of everything said on HN in the comments.
- buro9 16y agoI'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.
- scottporad 16y agoI'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.
- btilly 16y agoAmazon tried this a long time ago, and people were upset. See http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/4188108-1.html http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/4188108-1.h... for confirmation.
- damoncali 16y agoWhat 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 16y agoWhat 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 16y agoJust 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 16y agoIn 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.)
- ganjianwei 16y agoI 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.
- maukdaddy 16y ago* 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 16y agoany idea where to find that and how to remove it?
- aresant 16y agoPrice 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-from-an-1890-economist-nearly-doubles-website-profits/ http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/06/one-simple-secret-f...
- petercooper 16y agoFWIW, 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.