Tag: Internet

On Orbitz, Windows Users Steered to Cheaper Hotels

The fun economics story of the day is that Orbitz sometimes looks at your computer’s operating system to decide what hotel options to show you. Dana Mattioli breaks the story over at the Wall Street Journal:

Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.’s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.

The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people’s online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn’t showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.

Here are examples from the WSJ’s experiments:

The WSJ emphasizes that Mac users see higher-priced hotels. For example, Mattioli’s article is headlined: “On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels.”

My question: Would you feel any different if, instead, the WSJ emphasized that Windows users are directed to lower-priced hotels? For example, Windows users are prompted about the affordable lodgings at the Travelodge in El Paso, Texas. (Full disclosure: I think I once stayed there.)

As Mattioli notes, it’s important to keep in mind that Orbitz isn’t offering different prices, it’s just deciding which hotels to list prominently. And your operating system is just one of many factors that go into this calculation. Others include deals (hotels offering deals move up the rankings), referring site (which can reveal a lot about your preferences), return visits (Orbitz learns your tastes), and location (folks from Greenwich, CT probably see more expensive hotels than those from El Paso).

Groupon’s Revenue Measure Shrinks More Than 50%

About a month ago, I remarked on Groupon’s explosive revenue growth (and its equally impressive cost growth).

The company revised its financial results yesterday, and the revenue picture looks less explosive. In the latest update of its S-1 registration statement, Groupon reported $393 million in Q2 revenues. That’s a remarkable figure for such a young company but a far cry from the $878 million it previously reported.

And what happened to the almost $400 million in missing revenue? That money–payments to the merchants who provide goods and services for Groupons–is now subtracted before reporting revenue rather than deducted after as an expense. In short, Groupon went from a gross measure of revenue to a net one.

The bad news for Groupon is that the new presentation makes the company appear less than half as big as it did previously. The good news, I suppose, is that its expenses went down by the same amount.

Groupon’s effort to go public has been one of the bumpier ones in recent memory. Its first filing emphasized a profit measure, essentially profits before less marketing expenses, that was widely ridiculed. That got dropped in the second draft. And now a gigantic restatement of revenue in the third draft. Not to mention, the company’s recent difficulties with the SEC’s quiet period requirements.

Groupon’s Explosive Growth Continues … As Do Its Losses

Daily deal leader Groupon continues to grow its revenues at a jaw-dropping pace. According to its updated S-1 filing, the company sold $878 million in Groupons in the second quarter, ten times more than a year earlier:

However, costs have been exploding too. Groupon spent almost $1 billion in Q2:

Put it all together, and Groupon has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars:

Small compared to the billions and trillions of red ink the federal government confronts, but still a formidable problem. Particularly given all the other players in this space, including a certain search company whose $6 billion acquisition offer Groupon spurned last year. I would have taken the money and run. But perhaps I am not seeing the secret ingredient that will give Groupon a persistent competitive advantage in the face of vigorous competition.

Groupon’s Explosive Growth

We’ve all heard the rumors that Groupon is the fastest growing company ever. Today it finally opened its books in its preliminary filing to go public.

Wow.

In the first quarter of 2009, the online deal company mustered only a quarter of million in revenue. In the first quarter of 2011, it brought in almost $650 million.

Wow.

Only slightly less wow, by the way, is the fact that Groupon lost $103 million in the first quarter. Marketing and SG&A are expensive.

The Attention Deficit Society

One highlight of the Milken Global Conference was an excellent panel discussion of how new communication technologies are changing the way that people think and interact.

Moderated by the amusing Dennis Kneale of Fox Business, the panelists were:

Nicholas Carr, Author, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”

Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University

Clifford Nass, Thomas M. Storke Professor, Stanford University

Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT

I am proud to say that I sat through the entire panel without checking my iPhone or iPad. But it was a struggle.

The full panel is a bit more than an hour. If you are short on time, you may still enjoy the first few minutes of movie clips illustrating some perils of modern technology. Here’s the link again.

Why Free Is a Bad Price

Marco Arment is the brains behind one of my favorite apps. Instapaper allows you to store articles off the Web for later reading; very useful, for example, when I am surfing and come across an article I want to share with my students or use in a future blog post. And the editor of Instapaper periodically shares excellent reads that I might otherwise miss.

Instapaper is currently available for both the iPhone and the iPad for $4.99. As Marco discusses in his blog, however, the iPhone version has sometimes been available for free (but with ads).

Based on his pricing experiments, Marco has decided that free is a bad model. In part that’s because ads provide weak revenues, and it’s expensive to support two versions of the app. In part it’s because the free app cannibalizes sales from the paid version.

But that’s not all. Another problem is that the free version attracts “undesirable customers”:

Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable.

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything.

Free is a risky price because it allows people to get something without really thinking about whether they want it. That’s why health insurers insist you pay at least $5 to see your doc or get a prescription.  And it’s why DC’s nickel bag tax has been so effective in cutting use of plastic bags.

Kudos to Marco for sharing his results and calling on others to run similar experiments. But I won’t be one of them. Free continues to be the right price here in the blogosphere.

No, the Web Isn’t Dead (Yet)

Wired’s cover story this month, “The Web is Dead,” features the following chart showing the portion of internet traffic in different uses:

Over the past few years, peer-to-peer services and video have gobbled up an increasing share of traffic, while the “traditional” web — you know, surfing from site to site, reading your favorite blog about economics, finance, and life, etc. — has been declining.

Chris Anderson cites this as evidence of the pending death of the web. To which there is only one thing to say: wait a minute buster. Just because the web’s share of total bits and bytes is falling doesn’t mean it’s dying. Maybe it’s just that the other services are growing more rapidly.

One of the benefits of being off the grid for a week-plus is that other commentators have already had the same thought and have tracked down the relevant data. Kudos to Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing for charting the data in absolute terms. Rather than dying, the web is still growing like fresh bacteria in a petri dish:

Three A’s of E-Book Pricing: Amazon, Apple, and Antitrust

A few months ago, I noted that Amazon and book publishers were tussling over the pricing of electronic books. Amazon had originally acquired e-books using a wholesale pricing model. It paid publishers a fixed price for each e-book it sold, and then decided what retail price to charge customers. Retailers usually sell products at a mark-up above the wholesale price–that’s how they cover their other costs and, if possible, make a profit. Amazon, however, often offered books at promotional prices below its costs. For example, it priced many new e-books at $9.99 even if it had to pay publishers $13.00 or more for them (often about half of the list price of a new hardback).

Several large publishers hated Amazon’s pricing strategy, fearing that it would ultimately reduce the perceived value of their product. They thus pressured Amazon to accept an agency pricing model for e-books. Under this approach, the publishers would retain ownership of the e-books and, most importantly, would set their retail prices. Amazon would then be compensated as an agent for providing the opportunity for the publishers to sell at retail. Under this approach, Amazon would receive 30% of each sale, and publishers would receive 70%.

The strange thing about these negotiations is that their initial effect appears to be lower publisher profits. As I noted in my earlier post:

Under the original system, Amazon paid the publishers $13.00 for each e-book. Under the new system, publishers would receive 70% of the retail price of an e-book. To net $13.00 per book, the publishers would thus have to set a price of about $18.50 per e-book, well above the norm for electronic books. Indeed, so far above the norm that it generally doesn’t happen. … [In addition]  publishers will sell fewer e-books because of the increase in retail prices. Through keen negotiating, the publishers have thus forced Amazon to (a) pay them less per book and (b) sell fewer of their books. Not something you see everyday.

Publishers presumably believe that the longer-term benefits of this strategy will more than offset lost profits in the near-term. What they may not have counted on, however, is the attention they are now getting from state antitrust officials such as Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. As reported by the Wall Street Journal this morning, Blumenthal worries that the agency pricing model (which is also used by Apple) is limiting competition and thus harming consumers. And the WSJ says he’s got some compelling evidence on his side:

The agency model has generally resulted in higher prices for e-books, with many new titles priced at $12.99 and $14.99. Further, because the publishers set their own prices, those prices are identical at all websites where the titles are sold. Although Amazon continues to sell many e-books at $9.99 or less, it has opposed the agency model because it argues that lower prices, as exemplified by its promotion of $9.99 best sellers, has been a key factor in the surging e-book market.

It’s also interesting to note that Random House decided to stick with the wholesale model, and many of its titles are priced at $9.99 at Amazon.

Of course, higher prices on select books are not enough to demonstrate an antitrust problem. Publishers will likely argue that there is nothing intrinsically anticompetitive about agency pricing, which is used in many other industries. Moreover, there is nothing to suggest that they are colluding on e-book pricing. Also, they may claim that their pricing strategy will allow more online retailers to enter the marketplace, thus providing more competition and more choice for consumers (albeit along non-price dimensions).

Speculating on the Greek Crisis, Internet Edition

At the recent Milken Conference, I attended a panel moderated by Mike “Zappy” Zapolin. His claim to fame? He struck internet gold by developing generic web domains like beer.com, music.com, and the all-too-timely debt.com.

It’s much harder to follow in Zappy’s footsteps today since the obvious names are all gone. Except when new developments create new opportunities.

So it was last Thursday when I had an epiphany: Given the turmoil in Europe, Greece may eventually drop out of the euro. And instead of resuscitating the drachma, maybe Greece will opt for a currency called the “new drachma”.

I had this little insight about 2:35pm on Thursday afternoon. And then I got distracted by the hoopla over Wall Street’s “flash crash.”

I finally found my way over to whois.net today to see if “newdrachma.com” was still available. And here’s what I found:

Domain Name: NEWDRACHMA.COM
Registrar: FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD.
Whois Server: whois.fabulous.com
Referral URL: http://www.fabulous.com
Name Server: NS1.SEDOPARKING.COM
Name Server: NS2.SEDOPARKING.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 06-may-2010
Creation Date: 06-may-2010
Expiration Date: 06-may-2011

So close. Great minds think alike, he who hesitates is lost, and all that. I’m sure Zappy wouldn’t have let this opportunity slip by.

Of course, Greece isn’t the only country in trouble. So here’s a question: Would anyone like to register newpeseta.com?

As of 5:40pm DC time, it’s still available.

An Unusual Battle Between Amazon and Publishers

Over at the New Yorker, Ken Auletta has a fascinating piece about the future of publishing as the book world goes digital. Highly recommended if you a Kindle lover, an iPad enthusiast, or a Google watcher (or, like me, all three).

The article also describes an unusual battle between book publishers and Amazon about the pricing of electronic books:

Amazon had been buying many e-books from publishers for about thirteen dollars and selling them for $9.99, taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of its electronic reading device, the Kindle. By the end of last year, Amazon accounted for an estimated eighty per cent of all electronic-book sales, and $9.99 seemed to be established as the price of an e-book. Publishers were panicked. David Young, the chairman and C.E.O. of Hachette Book Group USA, said, “The big concern—and it’s a massive concern—is the $9.99 pricing point. If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”

As an alternative, several publishers decided to push for

an “agency model” for e-books. Under such a model, the publisher would be considered the seller, and an online vender like Amazon would act as an “agent,” in exchange for a thirty-per-cent fee.

That way, the publishers would be able to set the retail price themselves, presumably at a higher level that the $9.99 favored by Amazon.

Ponder that for a moment. Under the original system, Amazon paid the publishers $13.00 for each e-book. Under the new system, publishers would receive 70% of the retail price of an e-book. To net $13.00 per book, the publishers would thus have to set a price of about $18.50 per e-book, well above the norm for electronic books. Indeed, so far above the norm that it generally doesn’t happen:

“I’m not sure the ‘agency model’ is best,” the head of one major publishing house told me. Publishers would collect less money this way, about nine dollars a book, rather than thirteen; the unattractive tradeoff was to cede some profit in order to set a minimum price.

The publisher could also have noted a second problem with this strategy: publishers will sell fewer e-books because of the increase in retail prices.

Through keen negotiating, the publishers have thus forced Amazon to (a) pay them less per book and (b) sell fewer of their books. Not something you see everyday.

All of which yields a great topic for a microeconomics or business strategy class: Can the long-term benefit (to publishers) of higher minimum prices justify the near-term costs of lower sales and lower margins?