If you want to help us tackle this, check out our openings on our Engineering team: https://www.theinfatuation.com/careers
Have you thought about this kind of thing and the type of user participation that you'll encourage?
Tim & Nina actually took the same approach originally by sending surveys out to people they thought would have valuable opinions and rewarding them with a printed guide.
I'm very interested how this works. I know someone at the big telco company I can't tell name here that was approached about years ago by Google in terms of selling of gmail. But the deal eventually fell between cracks as the price Google wanted for just mailboxes was too big.
It's going to be a great challenge to tackle and I'd love to be able to share how it all went once the transition is complete.
Too many Yelp reviewers take off points for feeling disrespected in odd ways or don't know much about food to begin with. I don't really trust a completely random person's opinion on food, so I prefer going to the "hobbyists" (forums). These people have their own biases, but the base level of knowledge and care is much higher.
Plus Yelp has a bad history (edit: disputed below) of extorting money from businesses by controlling which of their reviews show up.
Yelp is actually still great because they have the only good database of what businesses are open at what times.
Do you see The Infatuation continuing to focus on reviews, or adding in more analytics a la Medallia or Revinate? We do customer feedback analysis and have a few clients in the restaurant space - it's always interesting to hear about what value-adds review sites can have.
Would love to hear some of the feedback you've heard about review sites in general.
I have always felt the internet 1% rule to be extremely challenging in this respect. I took a stab with my food side project, but getting input has been quite a challenge.
Congratulations on the acquisition !
Any chance you can elucidate on what - 'user-generated-content counterpart to The Infatuation' is going to be ? - what challenges do you foresee on extracting the google tech out ?
Decoupling Google is going to be a big challenge for sure. Luckily, we have good experience around most of the technologies involved. The biggest challenge will probably be around finding proxy data/tech for things that only exist internal to Google. They obviously have an incredibly rich dataset to build off of and we'll need to find a way to deal with not having that.
Do you have any ongoing data relationships with Google regarding Zagat?
Did your acquisition include data ownership of all the Zagat data and information?
We'll continue to have a symbiotic relationship with Google from a data/content perspective, but being an external entity will limit us in some capacities.
A lot of things that New York used to excel at - taxis, delivery, etc. - are now being offered to the rest of the world at terribly high prices and remarkably sub-par service. It has come to impact the NY services that started it all. Please, don't be the Uber to Zagat's yellow cab.
They just bought Zagat in 2011, so selling it so quickly seems odd. It’s an undisclosed amount, so I assume it’s at a loss from its $151M purchase. I hope it eventually becomes public knowledge through Google’s SEC filings.
If this is just a way to buy deep data sets, then this makes sense. $150M for likely the best training set for food review in existence makes sense and therefore isn’t Google stupidly investing in review sites. It would also explain the buy and sell technique used on Boston Dynamics, Moto, and others.
Boston Dynamics was all Andy Rubin, and it didn't really fit when he left and Robotics collapsed as a result, and Moto was for defensive patents for Android (which they kept).
I haven't followed Zagat, but a sibling comment here mentioned it was Marissa Mayer's doing, so that would fit with the Andy / Boston Dynamics pattern.
There is also a PR disadvantage to feeding the idea that "Google owns everything".
Buying Zagat seemed like it was Marissa Mayer's project, so when she left it is possible there was no longer a real champion of the Zagat acquisition left at Google.
That was 7 years ago...
So you can buy a company, strip all of its data, and resell for a similar value than you bought it for. You can't do that with asset stripping.
But, on the other hand, if the data striping happens again and again, the company becomes worthless, even if it still has all of the assets and data.
Ah, the wonders of the information economy...
It'd only make sense if they couldn't acquire the data set directly for less than the price difference and transaction. An M&A deal for Google isn't cheap and comes with a lot of oversight, risk, and scrutiny.
Google is unlikely to be purchased. But if the NSA bought google, then it could use my gmail data -per the privacy agreement that I agreed to- “services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content.”
This is only possible if the organization is purchased.
I'd wager that Google doesn't have a platform like this in its corporate strategy. What other high (-er) quality, curated content does Google provide? I suppose a case could be made for its SEO algorithms (if you call that curating), but I feel that has more applications for its existing review service than something like Zagat.
Wasn't aware of The Infatuation. Will have to check out.
For instance, the Slanted Door review by Max Child...mentions nothing of the history of the place and the head chef Charles Phan, instead commenting on "back in 1995, upscale Asian food in a shiny setting was a new and exciting concept, and these guys jumped on the opportunity" which is borderline offensive. Nor did it mention the fast-food side restaurant with great options. And the juvenile writing style was very off-putting. Disclaimer: I'm Viet and grew up near Little Saigon.
At least in SF I tried and uninstalled The Infatuation because it was dominated by this single reviewer that I disliked. Reviewer calibration would be absolutely killer if they could make it work.
I see a couple image ads on the reviews, but I doubt that brings in much revenue. So are doing things like product placement/mentions in-article?
I hope you don't accept money from anybody pushing you to review particular restaurants.
Spotify was too. Wonder if there were ever talks of a buyout.
Spotify was subleasing space from someone else in the building, something that the owners, Google themselves, did not know and most likely did not appreciate.
Google is much less of a "penny pincher" nowadays compared to when they were small and far too scrappy. Google R&D has increased by 233% in the last 5 years and has gone up even as a proportion of revenue (12.9% in FY13 vs 15.0% in FY17).
