January 17th, 2008
I have been a member of e-rewards for a while now. They e-mail me offers to make $5 to $15 in funny money in exchange for answering mind-numbing surveys. The funny money compensation can be easily converted into gift certificates and loyalty program points.
Every once in a while I actually torture myself and answer one of their surveys. I don’t know why. Maybe it makes me feel important. Maybe it makes me feel better about my own failures.
Anyway, they are truly horrendous. I’ve got to wonder if the venture money pits that hire these guys even look at how the surveys are done. They are a lesson in outsourcing – always check up on what you’re buying – you might end up with a company like e-rewards. In fact, the business folks at e-rewards may well be brilliant, as they seem to have marquee customers and partners. Unfortunately, business people seems to be all they have.
Here is a screenshot of the latest question I stumbled over. Needless to say, I don’t use my brightest brain-hours for this waste of time, so I spent more time balancing my algebra than answering the question. Would you do any better? Are there developers really this inept that they can’t think of a better way to ask this question? (Hint: Yes you need to calculate everything yourself – no clever javascript helpers allowed.)
This is just the beginning of how awful these surveys are. The software asked me at least 10 times in a row about the range of revenue my company has. (How many ways are there to say $0?) Often it asks multiple checkbox questions like “which of these are brands do you know?”. Then you get to answer the cartesian product of all the brands you checked with 20+ poorly worded questions – one per painfully slow un-Ajaxified screen load. Often the questions require more thought about how to fill in the many small text fields than about how to answer.
Of course, if you’re in it for the funny money, you quickly learn to check only as few options as it will let you. Check more and you’ll be there for hours.
I’ve said enough. The screen shot speaks for itself. I’ll even leave out the ironies of this sort of a customer research company having such a bad end user experience.
If anyone has the connections to make a better e-rewards happen, contact me. We’ll be up and running in a few months. Selling against e-rewards would just be too easy.
Tags: erewards, loyalty programs, survey
Posted in Rant | No Comments »
January 16th, 2008
Patrick Altoft asks if people ever report paid links.
I’ve never reported paid links. The idea had never even occurred to me since I’ve never been encouraged by a search engine or anyone else to do so. It seems to be one of those things that you only know how to do if you are somewhat obsessed with the issue, like the four people who complain about wardrobe malfunctions when most people just shrug.
Beyond that, paid links are a form of advertising. I don’t see how they are inherently wrong. I think it is much more valuable to report splogs – sites with no original content and sometimes no meaningful content – that exist as advertising venues. These do far more to ruin our collective experience than paid links. How can I report splogs?
Some very respectable directories (e.g. Yahoo!) charge for the pleasure of being in their directory. This serves a few purposes:
- It destroys the economics of splogging and provides a first-level quality filter. Sites that exist only to provide referral traffic would hopefully be priced out and newer sites that have real content, and few incoming links, can pay to be seen.
- It allows high quality directories like Yahoo! to recover their costs when verifying that a site has legitimate content. In theory, this should improve the quality of the directory.
In fact, and this is just a theory, it may be that if paid linking were more widespread, it might balance some of the overblown voices of the new media elite (e.g. the 100 top Diggers and Commander Taco,) and push splogs to the bottom of the results. New voices could pay to be heard. If no one liked what they said, they would have to keep paying. If people did like it, the new site would get organic links and may be able to stop paying. Sounds like a decent result to me.
As someone who is trying to build traffic to a new site, paid links can offer an attractive way to get some early users.
Back in the olden days, the old-timers felt the internet was dying when advertising first appeared on the inter-web. Today, Google is making billions by putting advertising next to your baby photos and no one seems to mind. My belief is that paid linking and even paid blogging will gain acceptance once the ethics of disclosure and honesty are better understood.
Tags: marketing, paid links, seo
Posted in Tech | No Comments »