Phirate - New Pricing System

1/25/08 23:35

Sorry I wasn't really clear about the pricing rebalancing. We are specifically not doing this to bring "A-listers" up in the ranks.

The sole concern from our perspective is the perception of value for the spot. We have, essentially, a number of conflicting goals with the pricing system:

1. To provide an accurate gauge of the relative spot value
2. To provide an accurate gauge of the relative site value/quality (not the same thing by a long shot)
3. To avoid an unbalanced environment where new or unknown bloggers find it impossible to get off the ground.

The conflicts in these three goals are numerous. At the moment, we do the best at point #3, and we're ok at point #2. We are really quite bad at point #1 (ie, the price of a given spot is not well correlated with the overall popularity of the site, and therefore the likely number of clicks/impressions).

The objective of the pricing modification is to try and improve on point #1 without having any serious effect on #2 and #3. To do this, we intend to introduce a weighting factor from outside rating systems.

This won't instantly put popular bloggers at the top just because they've got a great alexa rank or anything like that, the major factor is still going to be drops, and thus hopefully engagement with the community. It'll simply allow some other factors to be represented as well.

That said, I am taking careful note of what's said here. I ask everyone to keep a bit of an open mind as we experiment but initially at least, the weighting factors are going to be kept very low so as to avoid any dramatic effects, so that everyone gets an opportunity to see what the likely results will be and give their opinion with a bit more information than we have available now.