cruel to be kind

When I first read about Performancing metrics going to Payperpost I thought “ouch – exactly the reason why I do only trust a few tools”. Because it was users and data for mining which would have been sold. And the backslash from the community was not small.

Interestingly now the Payperpost people “regretfully” decided that the deal was not right for them and the feedback from their community was not positive etc etc. Yeah right. As TC writes it in Amateur Hour At PayPerPost:

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

As sorry as I feel for the Metric guys I have to ask the question if I am the only one who thinks that the reason for the buying was not the pure metric solution but the userbase who so willingly would put out their data and their metrics? That it is about data mining?

As nice as the Performancing solution ever would have been, I never would have signed up for it for a very basic reason: Giving away your own data for what terms are good running on blogs and how their click rates are. In case you do not know it: Most blogs do NOT earn money from their current readers but from their back catalogue, once the article is indexed and has come up in the search engine rankings.

It is then about the niches of the world where you can see a kind of unimportant niche with high clicks and good prices. Analyse it and you have a gold mine. This is what you basically give away every time you install something foreign on your page. And with Performancing you also did track your adsense clicks. Great.

Now Payperpost: They want to know and prove what is working. What better thing to deliver to possible customers than “look. These are the blogs and this is how they have topics and this is how good click through rates are” (a very simplistic view). But for this you would have needed one thing: blogs who provide the metrics.

And this is the part where the users said “no more”. The storm which rose over the acquisition of the Metric Solution to Payperpost should have shown an impact on the userbase of people saying “I quit” – and I think this is what happened. Why else should you announce a deal and then cut it off again if the basic product itself stayed the same? Because the real part of the “acquisition” fell through.

And it is a good time to look at the parts you use and integrate into your website – what will happen if that data and you as a user is sold one day, hm?

In case you are looking for a nice integrated solution again – go Feedburner. They just added site statistics and you should use it for your feed anyway. ;)

Technorati Tags: payperpost, performancing, feedburner, metrics

Tags: business blogging