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PriceZombie is shutting down

pricezombie.com

11–20 of 219 posts

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#11

Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.

Can't you just block the bot if it bugged you? There are several bots I block, but that's not one of them.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#12

Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.

I don't know if is a RES feature or not but you can hover over a name and click "Ignore"

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#16

Can you create this a self hosted application? Then Amazon can't really track this ( i suppose). They should suddenly start tracking thousands of affliates and you could earn some money from it :) ( i suppose) Eg. Something like https://sendy.co/ , i believe they earn plenty of money also :p

Chrome extension for scraping and affiliate link placement?

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#17

Honestly I'm (selfishly) kind of glad that they're shutting down, as awful as that is. I browse Reddit a lot and the fact that every single time somebody posted a product, there would always be a PriceZombie bot commenting bugged me to no end.

Bots are the worst kind of comments on reddit threads, after the ones posted by people.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#19
post #13

It seems kind of extreme to shut down based on that. Wouldn't the technology be useful for other uses? I'd imagine that some would pay for that kind of historical data.

The thing is there are other websites giving that historical data away for free. Their affiliate accounts haven't been shut down (yet?).

So PriceZombie just can't compete. Makes me kind of wonder if they were just the "top" website doing this, and so they suffered from too much success.

Re: PriceZombie is shutting down

#20
post #4

YC partner Aaron Harris had a similar problem with his first startup[1], and is a lesson for all startups: It's risky to rely on one customer for the majority of your revenue. 90% of PriceZombie's revenue was dependent on affiliate revenue, and thus Amazon. Similarly, virtually all of TutorSpree's revenue was dependent on SEO, and thus on Google, and when Google changed their algorithm, they saw a similar fate. [1] h…

A similar thing happened to me with Google Images. They were unintentionally a major source of my traffic. Some years ago Google changed their Images service so that it continued to take images from other websites but was very unlikely to send people to the source.

It surprised me how little fightback there was to this change. So, anyway, never rely on platforms like that, always assume it's a temporary arrangement (especially if the platform is run by a major player).

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