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Why do they publish blogposts on such a lame paywalled website though...
Surely Airbnb - a company that runs a website - has the capability to put a text post on their own website. Then they'd own the content, and people looking for it could find it easier? It's not a revolutionary concept either, Facebook has one:
Wait, Airbnb already has one?
Genuinely confusing.
Why do they publish blogposts on such a lame paywalled website though...
Why do they publish blogposts on such a lame paywalled website though...
I was wondering that too! Surely Airbnb - a company that runs a website - has the capability to put a text post on their own website. Then they'd own the content, and people looking for it could find it easier? It's not a revolutionary concept either, Facebook has one: https://engineering.fb.com/ Wait, Airbnb already has one ? https://airbnb.io/ Genuinely confusing.
Distribution.
The reason for this blog post is "recruit engineers". Not every engineer is going to visit blog.airbnb.com, but presumably a lot of them are already on Medium.
They even close the article with,
> We continue to solve interesting problems around LTV every day (and as more insights come up, we’ll keep sharing them on our blog). Can you see yourself making an impact here? If so, we encourage you to explore the open roles on our team.
These blogs are always about recruiting.
Mega-tangent: As a host, I feel compelled to rant about Airbnb whenever they come up in a discussion. The last 2 years they have _really_ moved to squeeze the hosts. The customer service has been demolished and they seem to have taken a stance of "the guest is always right". I've spent countless hours going through their customer service as a super host, so I know I have a decent amount of anecdata. My suspicion is t…
PMS as in Pantone Matching System or Premenstrual Syndrome? AirBNB can be equally frustrating for users as well. Recently ended up at night in a new city in northern Japan where the host told me the listing was at a different address, where I found nothing, and got only radio silence from the host. Every hotel room in town was occupied that night. Airbnb support, seemingly in far away India, told me to try contacting…
IMO most of the things that people like about AirBnB vs hotels is downstream of the failed experiment of urban planning. If we want hotel operators willing to "spend" floorspace on kitchens and other niceties, then legal floorspace can't be scarce or special, but most of the current planning regime is oriented around enforcing limits on floorspace. Ditto for having options of places to stay that aren't tourist traps or commercial areas.
Mega-tangent: As a host, I feel compelled to rant about Airbnb whenever they come up in a discussion. The last 2 years they have _really_ moved to squeeze the hosts. The customer service has been demolished and they seem to have taken a stance of "the guest is always right". I've spent countless hours going through their customer service as a super host, so I know I have a decent amount of anecdata. My suspicion is t…
> So that's what many of us are doing, moving to PMS + paid advertising / SEO For those of us not in this space, what does PMS mean?
Mega-tangent: As a host, I feel compelled to rant about Airbnb whenever they come up in a discussion. The last 2 years they have _really_ moved to squeeze the hosts. The customer service has been demolished and they seem to have taken a stance of "the guest is always right". I've spent countless hours going through their customer service as a super host, so I know I have a decent amount of anecdata. My suspicion is t…
> So that's what many of us are doing, moving to PMS + paid advertising / SEO For those of us not in this space, what does PMS mean?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PMS as in Pantone Matching System or Premenstrual Syndrome? AirBNB can be equally frustrating for users as well. Recently ended up at night in a new city in northern Japan where the host told me the listing was at a different address, where I found nothing, and got only radio silence from the host. Every hotel room in town was occupied that night. Airbnb support, seemingly in far away India, told me to try contacting…
PMS - Property Management System, aka what actual hotels use to manage room inventory, bookings, etc. IMO most of the things that people like about AirBnB vs hotels is downstream of the failed experiment of urban planning. If we want hotel operators willing to "spend" floorspace on kitchens and other niceties, then legal floorspace can't be scarce or special, but most of the current planning regime is oriented around…
Where I'm staying at the moment is a "serviced apartment" and does have a couple burners but that's unusual and I mostly stay here because I like the location in London.
Man I'm so sick of trying to find something on Airbnb only to discover by the time I order that the price has doubled. Airbnb these last years went from feeling fresh and adventurous to scammy and dubious
I feel like this is missing a really important factor: how likely are guests to use airbnb again after staying at a listing? A listing could look great online and receive a lot of bookings (so high LTV), but ultimately drive users away from the platform. A certain ad platform I worked on cared a lot about this - offensive ads could get you to quit the site altogether. You might want to count every ad as positive for…
Going deeper with modeling users might yield some tighter estimates, but I imagine this gets estimates far closer than some simple accounting formula, and likely helpful for budgeting a year out — but it would have been nice to have seen some performance metrics.
I feel like this is missing a really important factor: how likely are guests to use airbnb again after staying at a listing? A listing could look great online and receive a lot of bookings (so high LTV), but ultimately drive users away from the platform. A certain ad platform I worked on cared a lot about this - offensive ads could get you to quit the site altogether. You might want to count every ad as positive for…
No model is perfect, but some are useful. Their "baseline LTV" looks at the sum of listings on their platform (plus other features), then tries to forecast the next 365 days — so this should indirectly capture people coming and going. I think their cannibalization model is quite clever as well. Going deeper with modeling users might yield some tighter estimates, but I imagine this gets estimates far closer than some…