Unless you have been living under a rock (and sometimes I wish I could) you know about the latest debacle between Jason Calacanis and comScore. If you don’t, fellow LayeredByte column writer, Alex Wilhelm, has a nice little synopsis of the situation over on TheNextWeb.Now that you’re caught up, I think you readers can take a good guess that the blogosphere, as well as the twitterosphere, has been all up in arms over this. As we should assume, comScore has been taking the brunt of the beating while Jason has been getting most of the praise. After all, Jason is a well respected figure in the tech industry and the internet in general expects all things web to be free. Impressively enough though, even with most of the social media world against comScore, they are still sticking to their guns and touting an amazing amount of confidence in their latest business decision.
Start ups should take note.
Bloggers tend to bitch, a lot. It is easier to bitch rather than praise. It also helps traffic is usually doubled compared to a post that puts a company in a positive light, and since advertisers only care about numbers, it’s only natural that we bitch. So you can expect every product release and feature added will be reviewed in the most negative light possible due to the numbers game. We have seen this play out countless times, whether it be Google enlarging their text field or Facebook changing their design for the fiftieth time, overall response is amazingly negative. Still, very rarely has Google or Facebook decided to change their positions on certain feature or product releases.
This is because they most likely know based off of countless studies and looking at the data that this is the most beneficial decision for the majority of their users and for furthering their business. This leads to a lot of confidence in their decision, even if it seems like the majority is up against them.
So, start ups, instead of listening to bloggers when they trash your latest product, use the numbers available to you to determine if a feature really needs to be changed or added. The numbers don’t lie and while it doesn’t matter much, it earns brownie points from at least me. Even if I do truly disagree with your decision, it shows confidence in your product and what decisions you are making. Changing every feature or adding features at the whim of a bloggers complaint shows you have a weak spine and don’t know exactly where you want to go with your product.
So the take away from this? Have a bit of confidence, don’t take shit from us number obsessed bloggers and show a bit of backbone when releasing new features. I promise, it is most likely in your best interest as a start up to grow and make it as a business in this fast paced world.
FACT: Jason isn't just a blogger, he is currently the CEO of Mahalo, which is still a start-up. So he has reason to bitch about it. Having said that, I can't side with either of them, as I've avoided most of the stories on the up-roar.
As for Google and Facebook, Google probably has numbers to back up their changes, but I'd bet Facebook has learned that even when they're arrogant and piss everyone off, people still need the site for what they do, so they'll look over it.
Striking “Jason has a reason to bitch” bit, all fair points.
W/E as a pro blogger a lot of this made sense.
Alex, I didn't say that it doesn't make sense, I was just pointing out various errors in the post. I could also go further than what I did, because it's an error to say Jason expects everything on the web for free, he doesn't if you read anything he's written or listened to nearly anything he's done over the past few years.
And the more I've looked into it, what he's asking for is to lighten up on the small businesses who might not be able to reasonably afford the charges for the service; but would otherwise have a hard time getting an advertiser if they're data isn't correct.
From what I've read on multiple sources, your count only goes one direction if you pay, and that is up, so this is encourages a pay to play market that would be unfair to smaller startups. comScore has plenty of other ways they could monetize such data without forcing the costs onto the site owners.
Also, just a side note, which I brought up with Holden earlier, just a few days ago, he was asking startups to listen to bloggers, and now he's telling them the to do the exact opposite. Self-contradiction in a short period of time is never good. Just look at the front page of Layered Byte for evidence.
Never said Jason specifically.
Internet in general.
Keep in mind everyone, the focus of this post was for startups to stand their ground when releasing new products. Next time I won't use such a fresh debate as an example nor will two paragraphs of the post focus on it. Just seemed to be something everyone could relate to atm.
Lesson learned.