Where do you get your recommendations?
We’ve spoken before about how ad-based online business models are impacting our experience on the Web. From intrusive interstitials to slow-loading slideshows, ads keep the Web free but not quite fully functional.
Beyond using ads to keep the lights on for a website (like Facebook) or a news site (like CNN or your local paper), ads can also have an impact (perceived or legitimate) on the fundamental features of a site. Nowhere is this more of an issue than with collaborative databases and recommendation sites.
TripAdvisor and Yelp (to name a few) are leaders in this area. Just search TripAdvisor’s site and you’ll see beside your results ads for related tours and reservations. Yelp isn’t very different. Search there and you’ll find ads for restaurants right at the top of (and scattered throughout) your list of results. Even when looking at details for a particular place there will be ads suggesting you try something else instead.
If you’re visiting these sites for general information such as directions or operating hours they’re great. The ads have much less of an impact when you know what you’re looking for. But when it comes to using these sites for recommendations when you don’t know what you’re looking for, the impact their ad-based models have on your experience can be very real.
Showing ads, not just as billboards that keep the site running, but as additional recommendations hinders a users’ ability to choose easily and leads them to question the reasons for the results in their search.
Users become inclined to ask themselves, why are things ordered the way they are? Why did I get these particular ads and offers? Am I seeing what’s in my best interest?
This leads to decision fatigue and puts an added cognitive load on the user which makes their search that much more challenging. We like to think we’re immune to advertising but it has an impact, especially when it’s embedded into the functionality of a product we use. Searching through a site like Yelp or TripAdvisor is challenging enough. There’s an endless pool of information and a complex collection of filters available to navigate it. By the time you get to your search results you’re already a little tired (mentally at least). If you’re pressed for time it can be even worse.
Once you have your results you now have to filter out the ads from the non-promoted information. That mental filtering may not take too long but it adds up quickly each time you come across an ad. Coupled with the paradox of choice we face dealing with more search results than we really need, searching these collaborative databases is a trying mental exercise.
This is made even more difficult when you finally find something worth investigating only to see another ad or ‘promoted’ recommendation show up on the page of whatever it was you were interested in. At best it’s an annoyance but at worst it causes you to second guess yourself or distracts you from making a decision and keeps you clicking around on the site.
Eventually, you’re so worn out that the ads and promotions start to look a lot more attractive. You think to yourself, who cares if it’s an ad? If it’s the top search result that means I don’t have to keep scrolling. Or planning a trip is hard, but this promoted travel package would mean no more clicking around.
In the end, you get a result that’s just good enough and the site gets their ad or referral revenue.
If the current model is so suboptimal then why do users put up with it?
For two big reasons, lack of viable competition and self-blame.
Collaborative databases are hard to build. What Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and others have put together through thousands of hours of human effort is quite impressive. They have managed to organize human activity in a productive way that has given society and extremely useful collection of data.
But they own that data. They control who can access it and how much it can be used. This limits the capabilities of many potential new competitors and increasingly makes these large database companies appear like the only game in town for many. If you don’t like the current experience they offer you’re more than welcome to try a competitor but you can’t know if that competitor will have access to enough information to give users confidence in their search results. This uncertainty discourages adopting an alternative solution and keeps us coming back to sites we’re familiar with.
But sometimes it’s difficult to see the problem in the first place. Instead of associating a poor experience with the functionality of the site, we blame ourselves. It’s not due to self-loathing but rather due to how we perceive the exchange between us and the site we’re using.
It’s a matter of too much choice. When we use these large databases to find answers we get a ton of results. It’s hard enough to sort through them all, but when (or if) you do pick something the pressure is on you to make the right call. After all, with so many options it’s not like the site failed to provide the perfect recommendation it’s your fault if you made a bad pick.
We believe that the perfect option was provided to us (how could it not be with so many search results) but we just happened to pick the worst one. On top of that, because of all of those ads and promotions we’d been constantly rejecting in the back of our minds during our search we’re left to question if maybe we rejected a better alternative in exchange for an experience that didn’t quite hit the mark.
Ultimately, we feel that since we made the choice the blame falls on us.
But if we settled with a poor choice because we were too tired from processing pages of results and ads then some (or even most) of the blame is owed to a poor search experience.
This is not to say that these large database businesses are doing this maliciously. The truth is that they were never meant to be used as a tool for recommendations. They were supposed to be a repository of reviews and listings that users could rely on for useful information.
This makes their ad-based model quite reasonable, but as users have demanded help with recommendations these sites have offered up solutions not quite separated enough from their old monetization strategy. They will likely remain a valuable resource for insight on places you’re curious about, but it will fall upon new companies with different business models to help users discover new experiences in the future.
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