Soaring Community Consumer Warning

On Wednesday, April 10, 2013 8:25:18 PM UTC-4, Don Johnstone wrote:

I have been waiting for sometime for someone else to deduce why an
exclusive policy is not only bad but can never ever work on the internet.
Let us assume that there is some rsole who decides that he wants a real pop
at a site that has an exclusive policy.
He sets up a new "free ad" site. He then cuts and pastes all the ads from
the exclusive site onto his own site, which being in Cuba is not accessible
to US Law. The ads are now posted on two sites. The eclusive site contacts
the owners of the ads instructing them to remove the ad from the other
site, which of course they cannot do as they do not control the site. All
the ads are removed from the exclusive site which now has no ads. Any new
ad is cut and pasted and gets removed.
A site with free ads is not going to get many visitors if it has no ads.

QED you have to think these things through.


Actually, Don, we no longer have to *assume* there are people such as you describe.

In any case, when your hypothetical Sailplanes of Cuba (SCUBA) launches, it’s Tim's problem. He doesn't need experts on RAS telling him how to run his business and trying to protect him from himself because his business model "can never ever work on the Internet". [You don’t work for the government, by any chance? ]

And the scenario you describe where Tim blindly cancels every ad that pops up on SCUBA until he has none left ignores behavioral response to change. It's why politicians are surprised when they boost tax rates dramatically and tax revenues don't go up proportionately. People or companies move out of the state or country, they shift income to other sources, or they take advantage of tax loopholes. [Same question about your line of work. ]

But let's say Tim behaves as you predict and blindly deletes all his ads because they're also displayed on SCUBA. That site is going to have a problem once those first sailplanes are sold. Where to get new ads? Oh, and that assumes SCUBA knows when to take down an ad when the sailplane is sold.

OK, presumably sellers have shifted to the other free ad sites. SCUBA can scrape those sites, too. Only now, unlike on Wings & Wheels, there's not just one ad. Many sellers have listed on several sites. And the listings aren't always identical. Sellers can (and will) update the price or the details or text anytime they want trying to appeal. So pretty soon SCUBA has 2 or 3 or 10 times as many ads as there are actual sailplanes for sale.

For that matter, Tim doesn't have to behave as predicted and cancel out all his sellers. He could keep his current ads and simply edit them every few weeks (or days) to change the price by $5 or the description (ASW-24 to ASW 24 or SGS 2-33 to Schweizer 2-33) or reformat/rearrange/add/delete words in the text or put some of the headers in images rather than text, or any of the things that are done in the real world to discourage screen scraping.

Same result: SCUBA would soon be a mess of duplicate and obsolete listings. Sure, you could configure a rules engine to analyze the ads to determine which ones are (probably) dupes. Or just pick up the most current ones from Tim’s site and delete the ones that don’t exist anywhere. But how much time is this hypothetical person willing to devote to destroying Tim’s free service? Will he keep going day after day, doing and saying the same things trying to slam Tim? That’s hard to believe.

As you said, Don, you have to think these things through!

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.