The dirty little secret of Web 2.0 — the version in which users like you create much of the content — is that companies have been trying for years to “monetize” it, and mostly failing. Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg and the like are wildly popular, but they’re not making money the way Google and Amazon did.
All that math brain power that Wall Street is busy shedding: Can it plug into the algorithm economy of profiling, preferences, predictions and recommendations?
I called Darren Vengroff. He’s the chief scientist at RichRelevance, a San Francisco company that helps e-commerce sites figure out what to recommend to their customers. Like Amazon’s, the recommendations are based on the statistical analysis of people’s behavioral patterns. But RichRelevance is trying to take it a step further. Vengroff worked in exotic derivatives at Goldman Sachs before moving his math smarts to Amazon in 2002. He has a phd in computer science from Brown.
We started working with [e-commerce service provider] richrelevance because it was in line with our cutting-edge philosophy. Its platform gives out automated recommendations based on what people have searched for and what is most popular. We can examine analytics from the site and determine which data points will be used.
Forty-eight percent of online shoppers plan to spend less this year, but 61 percent are positively influenced by online shopping resources, according to a new study.
The study was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research
company, and surveyed more than 800 consumers nationwide in November and December 2008. It was commissioned by Bazaarvoice
48% of web shoppers plan to spend less this year than they did in 2008, but 61% of consumers who are reluctant to buy this year say web resources such as recommendations and promotional e-mails would help convince them to buy, according to a new study by JupiterResearch, a unit of Forrester Research Inc.
It seems like the news about the economy gets worse by the day. If it has you scratching your head (or ripping out your hair) trying to figure out what your online marketing strategy should be in the coming years, don’t get discouraged just yet.
In a survey conducted by Jupiter Research for Bazaarvoice and richrelevance, 61% of reluctant shoppers said they could be positively swayed by online shopping resources.