"Arrington Has a Point" says offer provider - 10% satisfaction with mobile | Hacker News Reader

"Arrington Has a Point" says offer provider - 10% satisfaction with mobile

peanutlabs.wordpress.com

12 pointsjim-greer8 comments

We conducted a research survey of 11,678 users over the weekend across our publisher network (~500+ applications) with sample representative of the US online population.

This is blatant selection bias - asking people who opt to take a survey rather than sign up for some offer whether they prefer surveys. I don't think this survey adds anything reliable to the social gaming discussion.

The article's second claim is incorrectly stated initially, but corrected further down the page.

"After conducting the survey, we looked at our respondent data on both offers and surveys completed within Peanut Labs. Interestingly, we found that all the users we surveyed complete at least twice as many market research surveys as offers. Users between 20 and 29 complete nearly 4.5 times as many research surveys as offers while users between 40 and 49 of both sexes complete over 7 times as many market research surveys as offers. The specific numbers on that are below."

Yes, these are people that took a research survey, but I think the numbers are striking.

This witch hunt is getting ridiculous.

First of all, your headline is misleading. The article says: "Nearly 90% of users we surveyed were either unhappy or neutral when it came to mobile advertising offers." Last I checked, neutral != dissatisfied. (Granted, the actual number if you look at the bar chart is still a whopping 70%)

But if you look at the other charts, it shows that users were somewhat more satisfied with the other, non-mobile based offers. If the entire industry was based on scamming people, customers would report 100% dissatisfaction across the board.

Plus, you can avoid offers entirely and just opt to pay for the virtual currency directly. Perhaps you think such users are foolish, but they're certainly not getting scammed.

None of this adds up to "The entire social gaming business is unethical and evil", as the TechCrunch article would have you believe.

entire industry was based on scamming people, customers would report 100% dissatisfaction across the board

Quite wrong. Scammed individuals are notoriously bad about reporting the scam, because it makes them look bad for being scammed.

the problem is that you can't complain. Who do you talk to? Call the cops for getting scammed out of $10? Call the company? Which one? The game company? The phone company? The ad network?

This is where class action suits come in handy.

Sorry, you're right, I changed the title to be more accurate.

And for what it's worth, while the mobile offers are terrible, I don't think the entire business is unethical or evil. I'd just like to see the scammier offers cleaned up.

I work for Peanut Labs, it's been a fun day making sure we're 100% compliant with Facebook's guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

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