Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

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It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.

Everyone plays the balance game. You can have the best customer service in the world, but my daughter is still going to cry if your moving company breaks her stuff, or your store sells us tainted dog food, or your family-run email service writes the wrong data to the backup tapes just before a failure. Amazon might be awesome in terms of rates of well handled customers, but Google is doing pretty well, maw metaphors notwithstanding.

edit: it's really the rates of bad experiences/customer I'm talking about. There's another side of things, that of, bad experiences/customer with a problem, which Amazon is better at (in a market that isn't really comparable to the one in which google's services primarily reside, of course). On the other hand, Bezos's often cited goal of every call that has to be made to customer service being a bug to be fixed is exactly google's goal, it just sounds a lot better when there's still a number you could call.

It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.

Except we're not their customers.

You can substitute "user", but as william42 pointed out, the distinction means little. Feel free to bring up to anyone here relying on VC that their users aren't their customers, and be amazed once again at how little insight that provides.

If you want to contribute some signal instead of noise, you could say they have two sets of customers with sometimes opposed motivations. But that isn't uncommon (and if it isn't another set of customers, it's your suppliers or the hours in the day or something else). As I said, everyone plays the balance game.

The distinction is very important: a customer is someone who pays you money.

To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.

"you're not the customer you're the product"

It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong?

Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express.

But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit card companies certainly regard them as a customer...

Multi-sided markets[1] are much more common in real life than you'd think, and the subject of significant study[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

[2] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=multi+sided+market...

>Merchants aren't the product

Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").

This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.

Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").

Look again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OolP9gNLP6c

Look how much business they are doing! How much quick to process it is compared to cash!

You are right of course - most mass market ads focus on the consumers, not the merchants. BUT the merchants are customers too, and it is the consumers that credit cards attractive to merchants. Classic multi-sided market.

This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.

I'm glad it is being noticed.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." is the correct sentence [1], also you are welcome to explain why it's wrong according to you, but imho you are mistaken.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#325604...

is the correct sentence

I got the quote from [1]. You may well be correct about the original version - I was trying to make it as short and clear as possible. I'm not sure it matters too much, though.

[1] http://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/facebook-youre-not-the-c...

Concur: To lose a customer is to lose some chunk of revenue. To lose a user is to lose some chunk of page views to be sold. A very important distinction. You can offset shed users by adjusting the product to generate more page views, as publishers well know. Lose too many customers, though, and that's a lot of money that's simply not hitting your pocket anymore.

With that in mind, I'm pretty sure Netflix would not email me asking to know about the quality of a given streamed movie if I were merely a user.

And the way I know that is that YouTube has never once checked in on me to see how my streaming experience went.

I disagree with it. If I am conducting a free for all art exhibition (no selling of arts, just for people to see), then the visitors are not my customers. They are just viewers. I could have advertisers or sponsors for that program and someone could even be paying me based on the number of visitors. That does not make the visitors my customers.

On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.

if you wrote out your first paragraph in an actual formula, you would realize what you're missing here. You can't always generate more page views, so gaining or retaining users would then become what you want to maximize (as publishers wish they could). Lose advertisers, get more users or make the ads more effective and earn more. Make a product that users and advertisers like, and you maybe get more of both. Finding the sweet spot remains hard. Ignoring these dynamics is not helpful.

Your point about adwords customers getting someone on the phone is important, because not all adwords customers can. Preferential treatment for large customers is not at all unusual, and I don't think anyone would argue that it is bad. They just want a phone number they can call too.

Netflix and Youtube have completely different streaming models (namely youtube's is not adaptive), but I do see a "report a bug" link on there. But this ignores my point, which was not that google customer service is awesome, just that there definitely is a feedback loop ("there is zero incentive machinery"), and that "product not a customer" still misses the point as much as it ever has.

only at a completely shortsighted first approximation. Any policy they have regarding advertisers are parameters to optimize revenue as well.

However, you write "to be optimized", so clearly you agree with my original comment. Catchphrase away, then.

Yeah, but if we leave, then the advertisers(their "real customers") will too, so it works out the same.

It really doesn't. Advertisers have committed budgets and have switching costs that are often much, much higher than those of end users. It would take a sustained, double-digit-percentage loss of users to impact Google's bottom line.

One user fucked over out of 1,000, even if they never return, is pretty easy to paper over. Which is why there's no phone number a user can call if they're in trouble. They don't really matter, so it's not worth the cost to address their issue.

AdWords advertisers, on the other hand, they can get a human on the phone whenever they want. Because if they have an issue, it's honest-to-god cash money that stops flowing into Google's coffers.

They're the real customers.

We are customers, but the currency is attention, not money.

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