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Would you find an offer listings site useful?
trycatchthis
Member
in General
Lets say that I were to make a website which had a listing of all the offers listed by a given set of providers is that something which would be useful?
Medium term make it a progressive web app, and also possibly offer API access for a fee.
I noticed that there are a few of these sites knocking around, is there use for another?
Comments
What is your unique selling proposition for the user? Why should they use your site compared to other? And why should they pay to use an API? What is the concrete benefit?
1) The reason I came up with the idea in the first place was because I thought the way the offers were displayed on the forum could be improved upon.
2) I wanted to be able to do a side by side comparison.
3) I wanted to be able to search by features.
4) If I am going to put in the work of creating an API for offer listings I have to have at least the possibility to be able to recoup the cost of doing it.
What do you think?
You're about the 5,000th person to have this idea.
I don't think these sites are popular with providers. If you put all offers in a big spreadsheet/database, people will sort it by price and it'll be a race to the bottom. Providers have no chance to highlight other things that are unique to them, tell their story, etc.
Suggestions?
A table where we could sort by price maybe?
Serverhunter?
Francisco
From what I am aware of there are a few other sites besides LET. Given that information isn't there room for more than one server listing site?
Any prior experience developing APIs?
Sounds none.
Any other assumptions you wanna make?
DailyServerDeals I still think was the best implementation of this idea. I mean, I may be biased since it was my site, but just look at it: https://web.archive.org/web/20150301062215/http://www.dailyserverdeals.com:80/
A new deal, every day, automatically posted 24 hours after the last one. Had a handy dandy search and all that.
But LEB still won.
This is not what I was thinking of. But curiously why did you can the project?
Lack of interest and use.
Fair enough.
In my particular case I plan to use the code base that would go into such an endeavor on other projects.
Why do you think this forum won out over yours and others?
it rarely keeps up to date with current offers it seems.
I have managed to scrape offers from a few providers so far. But a long term more viable solution may be to offer an API to providers.
I have seen this happen with real estate listings.
Also are you talking special one off $7/y offers that have no commission or regular offers on providers websites? It makes no sense scraping an offer that has no commission but the regular offers might work.
I very much doubt that given the amount of molesting Woet does to peoples servers.
Francisco
This is the other problem...you will be tempted to prioritize those who pay the largest affiliate payment over those with the best deals, so your goals as the site owner are at odds with the goal of site readers.
If eyeballs and site interest have some kind of monetizeable value then scraping offers that don't have a commission might have value.
So its a site to maximize your monetization - not to maximize user choice and quality of offers. Hence the trouble is, figuring out a way to align your needs to maximize monetization with the users need for maximum quality (at any price point 0 ie low cost may not have the same quality as high cost, but within group of low cost their are standouts). The highest quality sites may not actually even be in the highest quartile for monetization and have a very low sell through rate.
So, I guess my point is - if you accept it for what it will become - maximize your cash, I don't know the viability compared to maximizing user benefit with a low ROI to you
Trying to monetize a project is putting the consumer first.
If you can't generate any revenue how can you put resources into making the service better?
As I said though even if it fails code will be used for other projects.
In the low end market, you never put your customers first
because, most of time, they end up becoming your enemies.
This is sad.
Perhaps, but that is the way of lowend lives.
Just browse past topics or simply stay here long enough. You will see hosts fighting tooth and nail against his customers to keep afloat.
Well, everyone can create a comparison site.
Issue is data, to keep that shit up to date.
You surely won't do this by hand.
So, you say automate it.
Sounds easy, you say.
Then you figure, 80% of the hosts here, use the same shitty billing software.
10% of them use their own
10% of them have an decent api.
Which you need to create an account, get an api key, integrate this shit.
Depending on what, XML can be a pain in the arse.
What about the rest? 90%?
But wait 80% of them use the same shit, should be easy yes?
Fuck no, these are humans, they write the stuff as they desire.
Means the description is fucked in any possible way.
Maybe it does not even have any description, kek.
So, you say, fuck this, we just scrap each website differently.
Yea hella, you have to create an integration, for every fucking possible website.
Fuck no.
I did this for a while, its painful.
But some providers, are willing to integrate into your API?
hahahahaahahaha maybe 10%.
Keep in mind, most of the providers here have no coding skills.
So you say, lets offer a WHCMS plugin, hahahahahahahaha
Are you sure you wanna touch that shit? hell no.
I have automated the scraping process for a few hosts. Over time will add more.
Well okay.
Providers update there websites, obviously without letting you know.
So you have to fix your shit on regular basis, some times even every week.
They happen to block your crawlers, could be an accident or just they don't want to get listed.
So you have to detect and circumvent that automatically.
Plus, most of the providers are behind cloudflare, which is fun if you let your bots scrap multiple websites, recently cloudflare got pretty good in detecting bots, so stuff is getting more and more complicated.
TLDR: Pain in the arse for that result.
Exactly this. I have done this and it's a nightmare and a lot of work.
Thanks for the tip.
If I find a host changing their website every week I would probably ignore than as not being worth the effort.
Who changes prices every week on a commodity item? As far as I have seen hosts change their prices every few years not every week.
Sounds like this should be open source so updates can come from 2-3 people...
@TimboJones or he could just get a few partners and set up a proper firm to do it. I dont see where the motivation would be for others to spend time getting deals together when the benefits are to the providers financially and noone else in the open source model. And how to vet another 21 company failure built under the noses of colocrossing? Seems many shaky companies could drift into an open source model. At least monetary reward would at least make the site owner vulnerable to ridicule if he let those games go on
Just let him do it.