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The Trouble With TripAdvisor

caitlin.mcdevitt — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:40:29 +0000

There are good reasons not to trust crowdsourced sites.

If you’ve searched online for a hotel recently, chances are you’ve stumbled upon TripAdvisor, the hotel review Web site. TripAdvisor ranks hotels according to crowdsourced feedback. Anyone can go to the site to rave or rant about a stay in a particular hotel. If the toilets at a certain hotel don’t flush, you can let the world know on TripAdvisor. If you’re charged extra for bacon with your breakfast or the toast is not warm enough to melt butter, you can warn other travelers to steer clear. Or if you had a wonderful stay somewhere, you can write about it in glowing detail. In fact, most of the reviews on TripAdvisor are positive.

When it popped up in 2000, TripAdvisor recognized a huge information gap between travelers and hotels. Hotel Web sites only showcased flattering pictures and sometimes too-good-to-be-true descriptions. Travel agents were expensive. And traditional hotel rating systems—typified by stars and diamonds—were widely recognizable, but few people really understood what they meant. (Most people still don’t.) TripAdvisor positioned itself as the go-to spot for straightforward and detached criticism courtesy of the traveling masses. Like Yelp and Wikipedia, TripAdvisor eschews institutional expertise in favor of the wisdom of crowds. All three Web sites flourished and grew because the public deemed them useful, and as more people used them, their authority grew.

TripAdvisor, now owned by Expedia (EXPE), took off, but—perhaps thanks to its high profile—it’s becoming yet another case study in crowdsourcing headaches. Just as people have been nabbed editing their own Wikipedia profiles, inflating their Amazon (AMZN) book rankings, and Yelp-ing false reviews about rival pizza shops, there are people who manipulate their popularity on TripAdvisor. Obviously, it’s the hotels that have the most to gain or lose from high or low ratings. They’d be foolish to ignore the site—which gets 36 million monthly visitors—and, some may say, foolish not to do what they can to improve their rankings. This past summer, TripAdvisor admitted that it was having trouble with hotel staffers posting reviews of their own properties. The company assured everyone that it has a dedicated staff who can sniff out fishy posts. It also slaps a red warning label on the profiles of any properties that it suspects have manipulated their own reviews.

Still, there’s not much that TripAdvisor can do to guarantee its credibility. Because reviewers can be anonymous, it’s not difficult for a crafty hotel marketing officer to commission underlings to post positive reviews of a property on the site. Or they can ask family and friends to do so. TripAdvisor’s top-ranked property in Miami Beach right now is a boutique hotel called the Betsy. It beat out 195 other reviewed properties for the top spot. But as one TripAdvisor reviewer points out, “I would note that we were told when we checked in that we were some of the first paying guests as march and April they had been trialling with friends and guests of the owners etc. This possibly explains why none of the reviews posted so far mentions the fact that the hotel is not completed.” The hotel management responded to this post defensively, claiming that all reviews came after this trial period, implying that friends and family had not written them. That may well be true, but, frustratingly, there’s no way for TripAdvisor readers to know who to trust. There’s also no built-in mechanism to make sure reviewers of a certain hotel have actually stayed there, which welcomes even sneakier ploys—including, apparently, reviews for hire. This now-expired job posting on Scriptlance.com, a freelance job board, offers cash for 100 TripAdvisor reviews of a certain hotel.

Crowdsourcing enthusiasts might claim that TripAdvisor’s value isn’t diminished by nefarious hotel marketers because their voices are ultimately drowned out by the rest of the community. But it seems like the rest of the industry isn’t so sure. Recently, Forbes took over licensing of Mobil Travel Guide’s old-school star rating guide and says it has plans to expand it. Oyster, a travel review Web site launched this summer, employs journalists trained as hotel critics to write reviews. Both ventures are betting that the final say on which hotels are best should fall to answerable professionals—who, before TripAdvisor, had always played that role. The pendulum seems to be swinging back that way, perhaps for good. Even if TripAdvisor is able to weed out self-promoters, a fundamental question remains: Are the rest of the 30 million reviews worth reading? That, of course, depends on who you ask.

Montezuma’s Aztek Revenge

matthew.debord — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:05:22 +0000

How the reviled Pontiac could lead GM into the future.

’Tis the season for new car models. Fall is when the automakers start rolling out their offerings for the next year. All-new models arrive, redesigns hit the dealerships, and updates to existing cars appear. But obviously, there’s a wrinkle this time round: Both General Motors and Chrysler are fresh off bankruptcy. And you’d be right to assume there’s extra pressure on their new wheels.

Chrysler, unfortunately, doesn’t have much new stuff to sell. But GM has a new SUV, the GMC Terrain, that is already a sales leader and recalls a vehicle that still horrifies carmakers and critics alike. That car is the despised Pontiac Aztek, an almost universally loathed vehicle that established the paradigm for the Terrain: the crossover SUV, a half-car, half-truck concoction that is one of the fastest-growing vehicle categories. GM needs to remember the Aztek, because it represents the kind of risk-taking design that the post-bankruptcy firm will need to go forward. The temptation for the New General will be to copy successful market formulas, rather than try to define new market segments.

The Aztek, introduced in 2001, was an attempt to do something entirely different. It was aimed at then-twenty- and thirtysomethings who liked to hike, camp, mountain bike, and generally participate in the whole suite of Outside magazine diversions, but who might also want a young-family hauler with a bit more flash than your typical truck or SUV. So the Aztek came furnished with a host of outdoorsy options, an interior that could be configured according to the recreational preferences of customers, and an all-wheel-drive system for the snow and the mud and the slush and the rain. The design was boldly idiosyncratic, but GM figured it would attract buyers. It wound up scaring them, but at least it took no prisoners.

It’s easy to berate GM for always failing to see where the market is going. But in this instance it was the first to recognize the need for a new kind of vehicle to fill the crossover segment, which would grow rapidly in subsequent years. A crossover is basically a 21^st-century station wagon. SUVs are usually built on the same platform used for trucks—and they often feel that way when you drive them. They also inhale gas. Crossovers, by contrast, are built on platforms used for cars, so they have better road manners, and they’re more fuel-efficient. There were some crossover-ish vehicles before the Aztek, such as the Subaru Forester, but these were seen as neo-wagons, or small/compact SUVs. With the Aztek, GM created something that had SUV size, minus the SUV stigma.

An innovative GM? Well, yes. GM can sometimes be, for all its detractors, troublingly ahead of the curve. And the Aztek was first in this mold. It was good at what it set out to do, despite the zany styling. And it showed that the four-door sedan, the hatchback, and the midsize SUV could be meshed. The Pontiac packaging was profoundly flawed, but the concept and engineering execution were solid. GM later rebadged it as the Buick Rendezvous and salvaged some sales before the product cycle petered out (the Rendezvous was much better received by families who wanted a more polished, less aggressively styled car).

In terms of innovation, the Aztek shares DNA with some surprising relatives, like Apple’s early, failed PDA, Newton, or its first stab at a portable, proto-laptop Mac. Apple (AAPL) didn’t succeed with these products, but the company began to define new markets with them. Obviously, laptops and notebooks would eventually become huge part of Apple’s business, and while Palm came to dominate the PDA market, Apple’s experience with Newton set the stage for its move into smaller personal devices, such as the iPod and iPhone. GM could banish all recollection of the Aztek, but the vehicle’s controversial design could be just the ticket as GM seeks to define how hybrid gas-electric-crossover technology derived from the Chevy Volt will appear.

Still, for anyone born in the 1980s or 1990s, the Aztek is increasingly the new Edsel, Ford's infamous automotive failure from the late 1950s. This would incline a swath of GM designers and engineers not to dare utter its sullied name. They don’t like the rather strange front fascia, nor do they care for the elevated rear end. They don’t like the lower-body cladding. But all these aesthetic objections are misplaced. The Aztek didn’t work, but it demonstrated that GM had the capacity to invent a product that people didn’t know they wanted. The General can still do this—the forthcoming Chevy Volt-extended-range electric car could be a game-changer for the company. But it needs to keep doing it.

And even though it might fail miserably … well, that’s the auto industry. Success is never guaranteed. But blandly hewing to what has worked, falling victim to fear rather than having the confidence to completely miss the mark from time to time, will not bring GM back to its glory days. Or even, someday, enable the company to return to profitability and pay back the taxpayer. So remember the Aztek. It may not have been great. But it gave birth to a new idea in the auto business, and that’s gold.

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Hairy Carry Trade

martha.c.white — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:58:48 +0000

Why do economists fret about the buying and reselling of currencies?

Hong Kong’s chief executive Donald Tsang blasted U.S. monetary policy at an Asian economic conference on Friday, saying that the Fed’s loose policies have created a “carry trade” in U.S. dollars that mirrors that of the Japanese yen earlier this decade, creating asset bubbles across emerging Asia-Pacific economies.

On Tuesday, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank president Richard Fisher threw cold water on what was otherwise greeted as good news: the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to keep interest rates hovering around zero for the foreseeable future. Fisher acknowledged that the flood of U.S. liquidity creates conditions ripe for a dollar-driven carry trade that could have a destabilizing effect on asset prices. In addition, the recession’s most reliable Chicken Little, NYU’s Nouriel Roubini, warned Financial Times readers that the “mother of all carry trades” is brewing.

What is carry trade and why is everyone so worked up about it?

The term has its roots in commodities trading. Initially, “carry” referred to the cost of warehousing, or carrying, a commodity. If I invest in grain, the carry is what it costs me to keep it in a silo somewhere until I sell it. Carry can also be positive: If I hold onto that grain until February, the premium I can charge for it might outweigh what I’ve paid to store it. In the case of currency carry-trade, an investor borrows money in a currency that has a low interest rate, then reinvests it abroad in a currency that commands higher returns.

The huge amount of money the Fed has shoveled into the system, plus near-zero interest rates, makes dollars readily obtainable. If I borrow dollars at close to 0 percent, then invest them in a bank in another country where I can get a 5 percent interest rate, I pocket the difference. This is the most basic example of carry trade. If there’s enough easy money floating around, it’s going to start accumulating in real estate and other assets such as bonds, securities, or even overseas equities markets, potentially pushing prices up to bubble levels.

If I’m an investor, the risks can be as outsized as the profits. The first is if my starting currency goes up in value against whatever I’ve invested in. When I have to convert back, I could lose some or all of what I’ve earned—or even wind up owing money. The same holds true if the low interest rate I’m banking on suddenly shoots up before I can back out of my positions. If I’ve invested in more complex assets, I could also lose if the underlying assets lose value. Most carry-trade investors borrow on margin; that is, they only have to put up a fraction of the amount with which they’re wagering. As a result, even a small negative movement has an exponential effect.

It would be a guessing game to speculate how big the dollar carry-trade could get, but the Economist estimated in 2007 that a trillion dollars had been sunk into the yen’s carry trade at its peak. It’s hard to quantify the scope of the market because it’s so diverse. Investment banks, hedge funds, and institutional investors all play the game, and the concept of exchanging one currency for another in order to reap the interest is simple enough that it attracts its share of retail investors, too. When the yen carry-trade was booming, the financial media coined the term “Mrs. Watanabe” to describe the large number of Japanese housewives dabbling in the practice.

It’s unlikely that the dollar carry-trade will attract American retail investors to quite the same degree, because the domestic Japanese boom was fueled in large part by that country’s high savings rate, an area in which the United States is still playing catch-up. But we do love our easy-money hobbies, so it’s safe to assume some people will just trade foreign currency for condos in Florida as speculative vehicles.

Whether or not the growth accelerates to the point of creating the kind of bubble Tsang and others fear is up for debate. It is true that the dollar carry-trade has the potential to eclipse even that of the yen at its peak due to the size of our economy. The dollar is likely to be the carry currency of default as other central banks begin raising interest rates (Australia’s already has). It’s also apparent that right now the Treasury isn’t in any rush to make the dollar get up off the couch and earn its keep. A slack greenback gives a boost to American exports and makes our (prodigious) debt worth less. With unemployment continuing to rise, and consumers still spending with an eyedropper, the government wants to avoid anything that could create inflationary pressure.

As for the drawbacks, while economists are concerned about overheated asset prices, they’re far more worried about the impact of a desultory unwinding of the dollar carry-trade on economies worldwide. When the tumble comes, it can be quick and sharp. The value of the carry currency relative to others can spike due to increased demand when borrowers around the world all try at once to buy back that currency they bought on margin. Last year, the yen gained 34 percent against the euro in only a month. Some point to the collapse of the yen carry-trade as a major agent in the blowup of Lehman Bros. that ignited the subprime mortgage mess into a full-blown crisis.

The Federal Reserve’s Fisher expressed confidence that America can tighten its money supply in a measured fashion that will prevent what Roubini calls a “rush for the exit.” Even if the Fed were to give investors plenty of warning about rate increases or decreasing the money supply, though, outside forces could trigger an unwinding. An oil shock or major sociopolitical upheaval could dampen investors’ appetite for risk and make the dollar more attractive as a safe haven investment once again, which would send its value higher in a short time frame. As this article from the Milken Institute concludes, though, a blow of this magnitude might succeed in pushing the greenback off its pedestal as the world’s default currency.

Unfortunately, that probably won’t be the only casualty if Roubini’s darkest predictions come true. The U.S. economy is technically in recovery, but many metrics of fiscal health are still in the red, and a sudden drop-off in the dollar carry-trade could plunge us back into a recession potentially deeper than the one from which we’re still struggling to emerge.

Explainer thanks Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard University.

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Why Do Economists Fret About the Buying and Reselling of Currencies?

Google Does Non-Evil Thing: Bans White Teeth, Flat Stomachs

chadwick.matlin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:06:56 +0000

The search giant gets it right in its newest anti-spam drive.

If you’re going to be the market leader, you might as well lead by example. Google (GOOG) has long dominated the online ad industry, fueled by its popularity in search and its auction-based approach. Ads on the Web, meanwhile, have been overrun by shady offers of teeth whiteners and stomach flatteners. These ads—which TBM has covered zealously—are classic bait-and-switches. They lure you in with the promise of self-improvement, charge your credit card exorbitant and unexpected fees, and don’t pick up the phone when you call to cancel. As I said, these guys are the salt of the earth. Unsurprisingly, Google’s ad network has not been immune to these scams despite their efforts. Ubiquity, after all, attracts the unseemly.

Google has long tried to weed out these ads and their scammer brethren. Its ad network is policed by software that detects the bad seeds and puts them on notice. (This is very different from some ad networks, like Pulse360 and AdBlade, that allow these scammers to spread their message across the Internet, including on The Big Money.) But the scammers are just as crafty, consistently tweaking their pages to sneak past Google’s requirements. It’s the oddest of arms races: Google trying to prevent some customers from giving it money, and the customers trying as hard as possible to make sure they can keep paying Google. When Google banned an ad and the site it linked to, the scammers just created a new domain and ad, essentially pointing users to the same place, filled with the same shoddy offers. Google’s old approach, while partially effective, still let too many ads through.

And so Google has made a minor shift in its policy that has major implications. Up until now it has taken action against ads, not advertisers. If an ad violated one of Google’s terms of use, the search giant would take it out of circulation, but that’s it. Google briefed TBM on its new policy: It will now ban the advertiser, not the ad, effectively neutering the advertiser’s ability to shift from one ad and shell site to another. Think of it like the struggle between the police and a graffiti vandal. Up until now Google has only been erasing the tags after they’ve been put up. Going forward, they’re going to take away his spray cans and put a GPS collar on him, making sure he never does it again. It would be a principled stand by any company, but especially by Google because of its position in the market. I worry, though, that the rest of the industry won’t pay attention. On this issue, Google might be a leader without any followers.

Google’s policy switch is so impressive because it reacts to the real-world circumstances of how these scams are perpetrated. The crackdown is meant to focus on all scams—malware, get-rich-quick sites, getting users to pay for otherwise free software, etc. But as a case study, let’s look at how it affects the white-teeth and stomach-flattener scams that pervade Internet ad slots.

To do so, I need to give a quick crash course in affiliate economics. If you’re a real masochist and want more information, I’ve outlined the whole sordid ecosystem elsewhere on TBM. The abridged version: These ads propagate through a network of affiliates that are paid to direct people to the scam product in question. Let’s say you’re a scumbag who wants to sell an acai-berry weight-loss regime. You’re not the one doing the advertising on search engines and content sites; you’re paying others to do it for you. The affiliates are usually directing people to an intermediary page that speaks highly of the scam product, making somebody more likely to buy if he clicks through to the product page. The affiliate then gets a cut of the revenue if the people it sends to your scam site stay and buy something. It’s the affiliates who are flooding the Internet with ads—the more they put up, the more likely they are to get clicks, referrals, and revenue. As long as they’re making more in commission than they are spending on advertising, they come out ahead.

Thus, it’s part of the affiliate’s business model to create as many ads as possible. And here’s where we get to Google’s common-sense adjustment. By targeting the affiliates, not the ads, Google avoids playing Whack-a-Mole and gets to the root of the problem. In the past, when Google banned an ad or linking site, the advertiser would just put up a different ad that linked to a cloned page. Google’s new policy will stop that. The company also says its software can detect if a scammer sets up a duplicate account in response to the banning, eliminating that new account, too.

(There are many concerned that Google will be too strict in its permanent bans, eliminating legitimate advertisers without explanation. Google obviously says that won’t be the case and that there’s a review process for those who feel they’ve been wrongly banned. As with the fight against spam, the key will be to limit false-positives.)

Google, of course, is not the only ad network that airs these ads. The major offenders are networks like Pulse360 and AdBlade, who are unabashed in giving affiliates a mouthpiece for their link-heavy intermediary pages. And because allowing these scams to continue isn’t illegal, there’s little incentive for ad networks to follow Google’s lead. There’s just too much money at stake, especially when scammers flee to other networks after Google ferrets them out. AdBlade is now serving ads to 150 million unique viewers a month, and much of their inventory is taken up by, how shall we say, non-marquee advertisers. Google has the luxury to crack down; many smaller ad networks do not. Economic incentives don’t encourage good behavior.

And so we’ll have to wait and see whether others follow Google’s lead. Until then, at least somebody has acknowledged the mechanics of the marketplace. There’s no doubt the ad-network community will hear the message. The question is whether anyone will listen.

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Google Does Non-Evil Thing: Bans White-Teeth, Flat-Stomach Scams