“Growth hacking” by hare brained MBAs
Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
41–50 of 183 posts
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#42As shop owner that switches to Woo I dig into many plugins the last year and only find a very few of those attention and countdown plugins that are kinda honest. - The majority of 'users currently see this project' are looking a few hours back instead of being 100% fake. All of them allow faking the numbers somehow tho. There are plenty of 100% fake ones out there too tho. - 'xxx just bought' things are usually real…
> In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data If you implemented the "looking at" functionality, are you keeping a connection open to the client (say, via WS) to determine if they are still looking as in keeping the tab open (or opencv with camera access to see that they are "actually" looking hehe), or are you just looking a few minutes back instead of hours? How would one honestly implement this fea…
I didn't. I don't think this feature would reflect reality at all, or rather reality wouldn't sell. I have a few hundred products and a few hundred daily visitors, so I am far from big enough to get some relevant numbers there :)
I would go for the minutes if I were big enough, or maybe a 1 hour time frame.
However I opted for other signals that better reflect reality like 'bought X times in the last X days' or 'product is in X wishlists' or 'this product is trending within our visitors'
IMO same effect, but honest and suitable for my size :)
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#43The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
After snatching that alleged last apartment in a 3 story cabin, we ended up being the only guests, and the owner was snoring in the attic.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#44The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
I agree with all your points.
However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it.
Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#45It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/ ). You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get…
If you're having fun, then what's wrong with that?
It's pretty hard to start game which's fun is based on PvP, yet you have no players
so bots are the way to go I guess
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#46The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super…
Presumably the majority of clients are happy, and go back to booking.com after their first visit, thus costing $0
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#47Bit of a meta comment but: I love the author's rewriting of javascript into "human-readable" code[1], while retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor. It feels like an excellent way of representing what is inside the programmer's mind when writing the code, and I will probably try to replicate it next time I coach a new student. [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*aXnY3j41mO3AShqSGiYgBA.png
>retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor
I think its just their editor's syntax highlighting, likely for Javascript. Highlighting numbers in a different color definitely helps, but highlighting a very small subset (I assume only in and of) of random prepositions doesn't really do much.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#48It should even be illegal to display these kind of fake metrics
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super…
Presumably the majority of clients are happy, and go back to booking.com after their first visit, thus costing $0
yes, loyalty just reduces the cost per click, but the math is the same, so they buy 100 people instead of 10 people with one reservation, but the game is the same.
EDIT: also think about how many times people book per year, maybe 4-5 times in the upper quantiles? so if booking pays 3$ for you, it will take a couple of months until your next booking so they can reinvest your 15% commission to buy other people.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#50It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/ ). You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get…
You know what strikes me as a cheap way to run a bunch of bots to populate servers? Send users a wasm binary for running a bot and run several bots on a user's computer in the bg while they're playing themselves. Maybe check for resource usage and such, though. You can populate enough servers to keep a constant rate of growth up to some reasonable plateau because the amount of bots scales neatly with the amount of pl…
Nah, bots are really cheap compared to simulating the game. You need to run the whole thing on the server all the time anyway, so you might as well keep a few dozen bots alive while you're at it.
It's only when hundreds of actual people show up that the machine needs to do any real thinking, and by that point you will turned all your bots off anyway.
Source: I built and run https://joust.life/