rohin

Founder here! Several years back we focused solely on our data content marketing agency referenced in this post. We produce content, but isn't the sort of stuff that's going to end up on hacker news.

Thanks for checking it out. The use case is blogging and content marketing. That's what we use it for at least.

Thanks for the feedback. We genuinely aren't sure of the pricing in the future, so your feedback is pretty fair.

Most likely what you see here will be free for the foreseeable future. If there is a paid version, it would be geared more toward commercial usage (high traffic visualizations with company branding, more advanced visualizations, etc).

You can also download your charts or export your data easily anytime.

Sorry, that was my bad fiddling around with the title. Corrected it.

Priceonomics | Staff Writer | San Francisco

The Priceonomics Blog is hiring writer #5 to join our staff. We're looking for data-driven people who are curious about the world.

Details here:

http://priceonomics.com/the-case-for-joining-the-priceonomic...

I work at Priceonomics, so maybe I can shed light on our motivations.

We make the kind of content we love and we sell products so that we can afford to make more of that content. The two products we actually sell (data crawling for companies and books for people) aren't particularly well-suited toward SEO (though our original idea, a Price Guide which we killed years ago, was).

Anyhow, we're a content site that's trying to get by without using ads. I think most of our regular readers appreciate we're trying to pay the bills by selling things instead using ads. We'd like to avoid jamming our site with advertising if that's possible.

Happy to answer any questions you have.

Thanks for the feedback! Right now the Social analyzer pulls how many people shared that one specific page on FB (or liked it or comment it), rather than how many followers a Page has or Users an FB App has. We could add that per your suggestion though.

We currently use it to see how popular various articles are on the web since FB likes is a good proxy for overall traffic. FB like are public whereas page views typically aren't.

Don't feel bad about the joke, that's how we think of ourselves too (I work at Priceonomics). I think it's actually an interesting advantage versus a content site that just thinks of themselves as a content site.

Hi, I work at Priceonomics so I can sort of answer your question.

The blog posts we do that use data crawled from the web pay off enormously in terms of generating leads and revenue for our data business. Here's an example.

http://priceonomics.com/the-seo-dominance-of-retailmenot/

The rest of the blog posts are done because we want to make them. In the past, there wasn't any direct financial payoff from them. Now, it seems like they lead to book sales which is neat.

Hi there, I work at Priceonomics. Thanks for the suggestions. We'll probably do a blog post about our marketing strategy of this book, but I wanted to address your point that the book had reviews as soon as it launched on Amazon. How is that even possible?

Many people had advanced copies of various drafts of the book. When the book went live this morning we emailed all of them letting them know it was up there. Hence people (all of whom are regular readers of our blog and seem to like us) could review it even though the book was only just released. Hope that clears up your questions!

BTW, do you have any data on the optimum pricing of an ebook being $2.99-4.99? I would love to see it.

Well, when debt is involved, prices doubling is a big deal! Prices going down 10% is a big deal too though.

You made a mistake in your calculation because you ignored leverage. Most people buy a house using some combination of equity and debt (usually 20% / 80%).

You need to calculate the return based on the equity invested. Assuming they paid 20% down that's $125K. The house appreciated $773K over the initial purchase price. That's a 6x return on equity, not a 2x.

But thanks for the lecture about how other people don't understand inflation / math.

Author of the article here. No, it was a straight-up cash purchase with no equity involved.

Hey, not sure if you'll see this, but we'd love to write about the decline of the domain parking business at Priceonomics (or feature a guest post on the topic if you're interested).

If you have any interest, you can email me at rohin@priceonomics.com

Rohin from Priceonomics here. Thanks for the kind words.

Well, we're trying to build a company that one day has hundreds of writers and engineers working together. So, we've been writing all along and want to do more of it for sure.

Some of this yes. But really, our first customers were / are other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data. Eventually one company we were helping asked if they could pay us. We sort of stumbled into our first revenue and then realized there was a business there.

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Priceonomics. Basically we started seeing more traction from two things (that weren't our consumer price guide).

First, the traffic from our blog was dwarfing the traffic (and engagement) on our price guide. We originally started our blog just to get links to drive SEO to our price guide. But, it turns out we love blogging so we really put our hearts into it.

Second, we started getting a lot more revenue from helping companies acquire and structure data than we were making from the price guide. All those blog posts we write were we crawl the web and do analysis based on the data? That was testing this out. We'll be writing more about that soon, so stay tuned.

The result is that we decided to focus on helping businesses get data and writing about data via our blog. About a month ago we started depreciating the consumer price guide.

Happy to answer any questions!

SEEKING FREELANCER - San Francisco or Remote

Priceonomics has two freelance openings.

1) Developer to help our blog

Priceonomics is looking for a developer to help make some improvements to our blog. We have an internal CMS that needs a few improvements to make it easier for our writers. We also need to make a number of front end improvements to improve the design and reader experience. Python, Django, AWS, d3.js, jQuery background needed.

2) Data crawling engineers

We crawl a lot of websites to figure out the price of things and other insights. We are looking to talk to engineers that are wizards at crawling and parsing complex websites for a few projects we have. Python required.

contact: rohin at priceonomics dot com.

I'd suggest listening to this interview with the the CEO of Xhibit for even a few minutes to get a sense of the kind of "value" their team is bringing to the table.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfA165MFcBI

Author here. We published this about a month and a half ago so the stock price information in the post is out of date.

Since then, the stock price of the acquiring company (XBTC) has fallen roughly in half.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=XBTC+Interactive#symbol=X...

Rohin from Priceonomics here. Tumblr added this new button to our site this week I believe. We'll figure out some way to change / remove it; it's annoying.

At least for us, almost all of our "handshake" confirmations for funding came over email after we had met with the investor in person or the phone.

Hey, you're right. We updated the article with your link and clarified the original source better. Thanks for pointing that out.

Huckleberry is where Midtown Rags used to be. Google just hasn't updated it's streetview image I guess.

Do you have a sense if it's difficult to acquire real Coke syrup? Or, do they pretty much shut out consumers from buying it?

We considered the "registry" angle but decided against it since it only works if everyone uses it. We wanted to build a tool that could be useful without needing any network effects to kick in.

Not likely. This was a self-contained project to scratch our own itch.

Primarily community driven to raise red flags about stolen bikes. That said, it's pretty easy to look at an advertisement for a bike and know if the seller actually knows anything about it.

Author here. In the article I link to a 60 Minutes segment that follows around families in Florida that turn to living in their cars as a last resort.

Worth checking out as it offers a very different perspective on the experience:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7389750n

Make a list of the top 20 PE funds (KKR, Bain Capital, TPG, etc) and then check out their portfolio from their website or WSJ articles.