Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook
blog.jasonshah.org
blog.jasonshah.org
I like the data point (from the baptiste piece) that offline commerce is still 95% of spending, thus it is a 19x larger market than e-commerce. I think the point in the shah piece about "I didn't even want a pastry" is also good. But to me it doesn't really argue that this is a failure. To me, it argues that this is a first step which, like all first steps, will need to be followed up with refinement of their monetization strategy.
I have a certificate in GIS. I live without a car and have some other issues. I have been thinking here lately about my frustrations with using the internet to try to find stuff in the real world. In many ways, the internet has been a godsend in that regard. But in other ways it has been pretty crazymaking. I asked a bit about this elsewhere recently. It didn't really result in some huge epiphany that I am just doing it wrong. It resulted in me concluding that this intersection of the web and the real world is just not that well done yet.
So I think Four Square is breaking new ground. Yes, that's always risky. But I am guessing they understand this space better than the hn equivalent of a few "armchair politicians" looking on from the outside. (My dad had a brilliant solution for every social ill ever. And was happy to share his wisdom while watching game shows and eating peanuts and doing not a damn thing about any of them. So, erm, I learned long ago that "talk is cheap.")
Very true, I still think they are on the verge of something (whether they are it or not is another question left up to the internet). I think it would be pretty cool if they worked with the stores to create an personalized interactive experience for the user. Checkins would be the first step, but after that, they could try to gamify the space/store/shop that took very little effort from the stores part, but also give reasons for users to go to stores beyond "you can buy this".
(I am sparing you my probably crazed-sounding rant. :-/ But I find visions of a future where something like Four Square is all about commercial only spaces pretty horrifying. So I am hoping for good news about where they are now in that regard.)
If I were Foursquare, I would use the metadata (reviews, checkins, etc) to build a Yellow Pages site that's powered by 4sq users gestures. But I'd leave monitization out of the consumer app entirely, and just focus on making it great and popular.
Internet yellow pages is crazy boring, stupidly profitable, and waiting for disruption. Google Places and Yelp are currently passing for disruption in that space. 4sq is in a unique position to do better.
Ditto for the Better Business Bureau.
Just my $.02.
Why? Tips.
When i look up a place on foursquare I immediately know "what to order" at a given place, I often will look up a place at foursquare while I am sitting there deciding what to order. The question will be how can they sustain the same level of content generation if their main hook is fading.
"The server was totally rude. She put lemon in my diet coke when I asked TWICE not to do that. It was the worst experience of my life."
Foursquare seems to have less batshit insane people on it. They actually do helpful things like post the wireless password.
So instead of:
"My date and I came here a few weeks ago and the initial ambience was great. We waited around 20 minutes for seats and the decor out front was..."
you get
"Try the veal. Seriously."
One is much, much more useful in the mobile context, the other is almost useless. Yelp also over-emphasizes the star-rating system (which at this point is completely irrelevant and pure noise) while Foursquare simply throw tips at you.
Overall I've found that Foursquare Explore's recommendations in NYC to be vastly superior to Yelp. I'd be sad if they go under.
Field Trip uses data from bunch of different sources, but also utilizes Ingress players as sort of "location scouts".
Or at least that is what it looks like, with the focus on gathering new portals at points of interest.
Yeah.
I played Ingress pretty heavily from launch till the beginning of this year.
As best I can tell, it's just what you describe with players serving to scout and submit new points of interest and check/refine the accuracy of existing submissions. I expect they're also gathering a wealth of location fine location data that could be applied to walking directions and public accessibility.
One of the more interesting possibilities I see for Ingress data is insight how information moves in social networks and how far a person will travel out of their way for a "reward".
I can see the collection and distribution of redeemable codes at Ingress cross-promotion locations being useful insight into a refined take on daily deals.
How is it stupidly profitable? I used to work at YP.com and they make all their money on the dead tree book
My personal opinion is that they raised too much, didn't built right Facebook integration and have never really figured out their market. They sure do have a lot of users
Hell, if yahoo is willing to pay 30M for summly, who knows what they might shell out for a company that actually has users and technology!
In this case, seeing some discounts around me when I search might not be such a bad thing. As long as I don't doubt the integrity or priority of real user recommendations over paid ones. If they strike a good balance, I can see this becoming a good direction for all involved: foursquare, me as a customer and (perhaps also very importantly) local businesses...
On the last front however, I can see how big businesses take over the advertised space, being able to pay more for it, and in turn perhaps pushing small local businesses out of focus. This could be the biggest risk I imagine.
That being said, without a product hook that's very engaging, I think it's hard to build a local ads business, which is what I think Foursquare sees as its revenue stream. Do people see Foursquare differently, as say, an ecommerce company? Do they even need a growing product hook to build a good local ads business?
B2C is hard to monetize, period. The Groupon collapse sort of shut one possible revenue door for Foursquare. Twitter can pull off ads because it has a big brand draw that Foursquare just doesn't.
I respect the team, but I don't envy their position.
I don't know how the majority of Foursquare users use the service, but my friends and I pretty much only use it to check-in - at a place that we had pre-determined. There is no discovery or opportunity for an ad to capture my attention or push me toward a promoted business. If I'm going to get a burger I don't care about your pastry ad. But there's no way for Foursquare to get this information. Not without disrupting the check-in experience.
As has been suggested, I don't see how Foursquare can grow their ad network with this kind of usage. How can they convince businesses to sign on?
Trey Titone suggested in the comments on the post that if Foursquare could do frictionless sharing with the app running in the background, maybe they could get more checkin data. But I think the battery constraints / privacy concerns are too high, at least in the next 18-24 months, for people to opt in for this without getting much product value.
Battery life will get better, apps will be more battery-efficient, and privacy concerns tend to fade away. But frictionless checkins don't seem highly compelling to me from the user point-of-view for people to make the necessary sacrifices that adoption would demand.
Is this anecdotal or based on data?
The rest, and a fairly critical piece of my statement, about checkins moving to Facebook and Path I admit wholeheartedly was anecdotal and speculative.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/foursquares-new-series-d-ro...
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/16/interview-dennis-crowley-of...
In the email, tell them you need to know their password and that your email changed to something and they need to email it there.
TaDa!