7 ms·

What happened to Priceonomics?

184 points by Danieru 13y ago

ivanbrussik 13y ago
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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rohin 13y ago
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!
- meritt 13y ago
  So you switched to client-services basically? What sort of clients? I'm guessing buy-side (hedge funds) and maybe a touch of sell-side (investment banks)? Those are the only client-service relationships that immediately come to mind which are profitable enough to pursue entirely.
  - rohin 13y ago
    Some of this yes. But really, our first customers were / are other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data. Eventually one company we were helping asked if they could pay us. We sort of stumbled into our first revenue and then realized there was a business there.
    - meritt 13y ago
      Good to know and good luck! On the financial clients, stick with the buy-side as they have substantially larger budgets and are willing to pay quite well for exclusivity. Providing data to sell-side analysts rapidly dilutes the value of your information. On startups aspect, I'm surprised to hear that they aren't just using readily-available tools like Mozenda for basic crawling/scraping. Guessing you're able to provide either the scale or deep data that those tools are lacking? There's of course the legal implications with selling someone else's data / marketing leads / etc to be mindful of which can definitely get tricky as times. Yelp is notorious for pursuing with legal action those who scrape + sell their data. Yet everyone in the SMB marketing world still craves it.
    - bambax 13y ago
      > other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data It would be interesting to know more! What data are companies crawling? A blog post about what you do would be great! ;-)
- ivanbrussik 13y ago
  thank you for answering, your mentions tracker program must be working. I understand that blog traffic trumped your price guide, and you love it, and it brings in more money but did you ever think of your user/customer? it seems as though just from this thread and the tweet that was linked (amongst myself) there are a number of users that saw tremendous value in what you do. ever thought of turning the price guide into some sort of UGC engine powered by the people and moderated by a thin staff?
- ivanca 13y ago
  But are you sure all the revenue coming from "helping companies acquire and structure data" is not correlated with the price guide access? That people that are long and short-term users of the price guide are the ones bringing their companies to your site?
- Danieru 13y ago
  Thank you Rohin and congratulations! I'm happy for you. It sounds like you've hit a market fit and will do well. I am still sad for the loss of priceonomics as it was. I would be more sad to hear the business was not working out so this news is better. Still could the pricing engine continue to be a feature of priceonomics? Maybe remove the auto-generated image and the ads thus stripping the pages down to just the engine's pricing? Please?
- beerglass 13y ago
  deprecating
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - nonchalance 13y ago
    the article used the cringeworthy misspelling homogenious
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Glad to hear you folks are still around and only pivoting to something (hopefully) sustainable. I've always been a curious follower of Priceonomics for two reasons. One: the sheer research/depth of your posts that hit HN frequently. It's rare to find blogs that deep dive into such a diverse set of topics while writing eminently readable prose. Would love to read a post on how you find experts/how they research topics sometime. Two: your name - Rohin Dhar - is a deprecation of my name - Rohin Dharmakumar. You've also been quicker than me in signing up with the @rohin usernames on most web services, HN included :) Glad to make the acquaintance!
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  The title of your website still says "The Price Guide for Everything". Are you going to change it?
- dmpk2k 13y ago
  One of the competitive advantages the company I work for has is that it dogfoods its own software, which for some odd reason is a bit rare in its space -- we don't just think we know the problems our customers face, we're suffering them every day. Somewhat relatedly, the managers I respect the most are the ones who continue to hammer out software themselves -- they don't just think they know the problems that software development faces, they're suffering them every day. In both cases, it shows. As such, I'm curious how you're planning to keep a healthy business helping other companies if you're not keeping your skills sharp on your own forge. I ask this in the nicest way possible. :)
  - lmm 13y ago
    I find the worst managers are those who try to pretend they are still developers. Managing is a full-time job, you need to be available for your team to interrupt; if you're writing code you're not. And since you will be interrupted, you can't pair-program or do anything that someone else is going to depend on.
- krmmalik 13y ago
  I sent you guys an email back a couple of months ago and you never responded. Most of the new articles, I have to say I like. I don't read all of them but I do read some of them. I don't understand how you're turning this into value for yourselves. Where is this all heading? I understand you're collecting data but how? How does that help you and other companies specifically? Would love to learn more about the direction you're taking. PS - Do you take guest bloggers?
- Nicholas_C 13y ago
  I actually had no idea that Priceonomics was anything other than a blog!
- mattmaroon 13y ago
  Well, congrats on finding product market fit then! The blog is high quality, so I'm not surprised it led you to it.
ramykhuffash 13y ago
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.
Danieru 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - Danieru 13y ago
    Please don't delete it! I'll edit this comment with my reply, just don't delete it! Edit: Thank you for the pointers, I'll wait out tonight and gather data from top and google analytics. I think it might be an interesting post to make. At present top is reporting a load average of ~0.7 and the website is responsive. As I feared W3TC needs edits to the nginx config. I was hoping to avoid touching the config files but that was just me being lazy. I promise the site will be cached before my next submission.
    - meritt 13y ago
      It shouldn't but maybe I recall wrong... what are you looking at? You appear to already have the seo-friendly URLs setup in nginx? That, I think, is enough? Basically you should disable cgi.fix_pathinfo in php.ini and have something like (in your server block) location ~ ^.+\.php { include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info; }
    - michaelbuckbee 13y ago
      FWIW - I ended up switching to wp-supercache as I had so many issues with W3TC.
mugenx86 13y ago
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.
uts_ 13y ago
This post may shed some light: https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392 https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
diziet 13y ago
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.
nostromo 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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?
deleted 13y ago
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dmazin 13y ago
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.
ankgyl 13y ago
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)
fusionflo 13y ago
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.
- Tichy 13y ago
  Just curious, how do you implement such a thing? I mean how do you avoid polling the stores zillions of times, which would probably eventually be shut off by the stores?
- mailshanx 13y ago
  That's some really cool tech! How do you implement this? In particular, do you scrape > 275 sites daily?
- talkingquickly 13y ago
  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.
poissonpie 13y ago
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.
AznHisoka 13y ago
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.
Hawkee 13y ago
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.

184 points by Danieru 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rohin 13y ago

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!

meritt 13y ago
So you switched to client-services basically? What sort of clients? I'm guessing buy-side (hedge funds) and maybe a touch of sell-side (investment banks)? Those are the only client-service relationships that immediately come to mind which are profitable enough to pursue entirely.
- rohin 13y ago
  Some of this yes. But really, our first customers were / are other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data. Eventually one company we were helping asked if they could pay us. We sort of stumbled into our first revenue and then realized there was a business there.
  - meritt 13y ago
    Good to know and good luck! On the financial clients, stick with the buy-side as they have substantially larger budgets and are willing to pay quite well for exclusivity. Providing data to sell-side analysts rapidly dilutes the value of your information. On startups aspect, I'm surprised to hear that they aren't just using readily-available tools like Mozenda for basic crawling/scraping. Guessing you're able to provide either the scale or deep data that those tools are lacking? There's of course the legal implications with selling someone else's data / marketing leads / etc to be mindful of which can definitely get tricky as times. Yelp is notorious for pursuing with legal action those who scrape + sell their data. Yet everyone in the SMB marketing world still craves it.
  - bambax 13y ago
    > other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data It would be interesting to know more! What data are companies crawling? A blog post about what you do would be great! ;-)
ivanbrussik 13y ago
thank you for answering, your mentions tracker program must be working. I understand that blog traffic trumped your price guide, and you love it, and it brings in more money but did you ever think of your user/customer? it seems as though just from this thread and the tweet that was linked (amongst myself) there are a number of users that saw tremendous value in what you do. ever thought of turning the price guide into some sort of UGC engine powered by the people and moderated by a thin staff?
ivanca 13y ago
But are you sure all the revenue coming from "helping companies acquire and structure data" is not correlated with the price guide access? That people that are long and short-term users of the price guide are the ones bringing their companies to your site?
Danieru 13y ago
Thank you Rohin and congratulations! I'm happy for you. It sounds like you've hit a market fit and will do well. I am still sad for the loss of priceonomics as it was. I would be more sad to hear the business was not working out so this news is better. Still could the pricing engine continue to be a feature of priceonomics? Maybe remove the auto-generated image and the ads thus stripping the pages down to just the engine's pricing? Please?
beerglass 13y ago
deprecating
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nonchalance 13y ago
  the article used the cringeworthy misspelling homogenious
r0h1n 13y ago
Glad to hear you folks are still around and only pivoting to something (hopefully) sustainable. I've always been a curious follower of Priceonomics for two reasons. One: the sheer research/depth of your posts that hit HN frequently. It's rare to find blogs that deep dive into such a diverse set of topics while writing eminently readable prose. Would love to read a post on how you find experts/how they research topics sometime. Two: your name - Rohin Dhar - is a deprecation of my name - Rohin Dharmakumar. You've also been quicker than me in signing up with the @rohin usernames on most web services, HN included :) Glad to make the acquaintance!
telephonetemp 13y ago
The title of your website still says "The Price Guide for Everything". Are you going to change it?
dmpk2k 13y ago
One of the competitive advantages the company I work for has is that it dogfoods its own software, which for some odd reason is a bit rare in its space -- we don't just think we know the problems our customers face, we're suffering them every day. Somewhat relatedly, the managers I respect the most are the ones who continue to hammer out software themselves -- they don't just think they know the problems that software development faces, they're suffering them every day. In both cases, it shows. As such, I'm curious how you're planning to keep a healthy business helping other companies if you're not keeping your skills sharp on your own forge. I ask this in the nicest way possible. :)
- lmm 13y ago
  I find the worst managers are those who try to pretend they are still developers. Managing is a full-time job, you need to be available for your team to interrupt; if you're writing code you're not. And since you will be interrupted, you can't pair-program or do anything that someone else is going to depend on.
krmmalik 13y ago
I sent you guys an email back a couple of months ago and you never responded. Most of the new articles, I have to say I like. I don't read all of them but I do read some of them. I don't understand how you're turning this into value for yourselves. Where is this all heading? I understand you're collecting data but how? How does that help you and other companies specifically? Would love to learn more about the direction you're taking. PS - Do you take guest bloggers?
Nicholas_C 13y ago
I actually had no idea that Priceonomics was anything other than a blog!
mattmaroon 13y ago
Well, congrats on finding product market fit then! The blog is high quality, so I'm not surprised it led you to it.

ramykhuffash 13y ago

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.

Danieru 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- Danieru 13y ago
  Please don't delete it! I'll edit this comment with my reply, just don't delete it! Edit: Thank you for the pointers, I'll wait out tonight and gather data from top and google analytics. I think it might be an interesting post to make. At present top is reporting a load average of ~0.7 and the website is responsive. As I feared W3TC needs edits to the nginx config. I was hoping to avoid touching the config files but that was just me being lazy. I promise the site will be cached before my next submission.
  - meritt 13y ago
    It shouldn't but maybe I recall wrong... what are you looking at? You appear to already have the seo-friendly URLs setup in nginx? That, I think, is enough? Basically you should disable cgi.fix_pathinfo in php.ini and have something like (in your server block) location ~ ^.+\.php { include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info; }
  - michaelbuckbee 13y ago
    FWIW - I ended up switching to wp-supercache as I had so many issues with W3TC.

mugenx86 13y ago

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.

uts_ 13y ago

This post may shed some light: https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392 https://twitter.com/Quan/status/388165409469243392

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

diziet 13y ago

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.

nostromo 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dmazin 13y ago

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.

ankgyl 13y ago

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)

fusionflo 13y ago

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.

Tichy 13y ago
Just curious, how do you implement such a thing? I mean how do you avoid polling the stores zillions of times, which would probably eventually be shut off by the stores?
mailshanx 13y ago
That's some really cool tech! How do you implement this? In particular, do you scrape > 275 sites daily?
talkingquickly 13y ago
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.

poissonpie 13y ago

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.

AznHisoka 13y ago

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.

Hawkee 13y ago

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.