Do You Rate?

I continue to be intrigued by the strong growth of Angie's List, a subscription consumer rating service that now claims over 500,000 subscribers. That's an impressive number of subscribers for any kind of consumer information service, and it's even more impressive because its subscribers contribute all the content. Indeed, Angie's List has achieved so much success it's confronting novel new issues as it grows and matures.

Now, Angie's List is moving to expand its ratings beyond plumbers and home contractors to include physicians, pharmacists, dentists and even health plans. I wouldn't go so far as to call this move into healthcare a risky or gutsy one; indeed it makes perfect sense. What Angie's List is diving into, however, is the large, complex, emotional and politically-charged world of healthcare provider ratings. There have to be at least a dozen sites currently offering physician ratings alone - Xoova, Vitals.com, ZocDoc, are just a few that spring to mind. We also previously noted that even ratings pioneer Zagat's has entered the fray.

Rating physicians and dentists on one level is fairly easy. Anyone can opine on how nice they are, if their offices are clean, or if they were kept waiting. But these are so-called soft assessments. What really matters is not how nice a doctor is, but how competent a doctor is. That's where things get complicated and ugly. The healthcare industry's infighting over defining and executing "outcomes measurements" and a related issue of "risk adjustment" (essentially, adjusting scores to reflect providers that routinely deal with sicker patients) has been going on for years, with no resolution.

Angie's List is right to stick with soft assessments. They play to its strengths and are far less controversial (although a growing number of physicians are saying that being rated by patients isn't fair for various reasons). But here is what bears watching: How large and robust will these ratings become? Though Angie's List subscribers represent an active and engaged community that stands a distinct chance of raising the bar for healthcare provider assessments, the more the site tries to cover, the thinner its content becomes. If Angie's List rates 12 physicians in a major city, has it succeeded or failed? I don't think anyone yet knows the answer to that, so stay tuned.

Other Recent News from the InfoCommerce Blog
Zillow Launches Mortgage Marketplace
Polk Drives Expansion into China
BusinessWeek.com Extends Reach With LinkedIn Partnership

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Labels: angie's list, vitals.com, xoova, zagat, zocdoc

A Ratings Ripple?

[Originally published 12/28/2007]

A small news item this week caught my eye: the owners of Angie's List, a service that rates home improvement and repair companies in a number of major cities, is suing yellow pages giant Ameritech Publishing. What Angie's List doesn't like is that some advertisers in the Ameritech directories are using the Angie's List logo in their ads as a way of indicating they were favorably rated by Angie's List.

My first reaction was that this was incredible free publicity for Angie's List, and they should be encouraging it, not going to court over it. Yet as I thought about it more, I started to see the other side of the issue.
First, if advertisers start to broadly include Angie's List "endorsements" in other publications, guess what? The need to purchase an Angie's List subscription is reduced. Cheap or lazy consumers can simply scan the yellow pages for companies sporting Angie's List logo and hire them with the knowledge they've been vetted by an independent review organization. Revenue to Angie's List: zero.

Second, Angie's List starts to lose control of its name and logo. A plumber well rated by Angie's List in January may not be well rated by December, but that annual yellow pages ad with the Angie's List logo keeps appearing, and appearing and appearing.

Third, people not familiar with Angie's List could easily be led to conclude that these advertisers have paid to be rated, which is not true. This leads to a distorted perception of Angie's List in the marketplace which could sully its brand over time. This is the primary reason that Consumer Reports has never let manufacturers advertise their Consumer Reports ratings; it doesn't want anyone jumping to conclusions about what it does or how it does it. If you want Consumer Reports information, you have to get it from Consumer Reports, which keeps control of the information, its presentation and its context in a way that enhances the brand.

Ratings services can have enormous market power, but they're like hothouse flowers: they will only flourish in a rigorously controlled environment. Let them into the outside world, and they quickly wither.

Labels: ameritech publishing, angie's list, consumer reports

Zillow Launches Mortgage Marketplace

Real estate website Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, a service that provides borrowers a place in which to anonymously request custom loan quotes directly from registered lenders. The lenders can respond to as many requests from borrowers free of charge. It also includes a lender public feedback system in which borrowers can rate the lenders they contact.

Zillow Mortgage Marketplace is accessible on the Zillow.com site from the "Mortgages" tab. Users then complete a loan request form to officially begin the process. They don’t need to provide any personally identifiable information, such as Social Security number, name, address or phone number. Yet, they provide enough additional information on the request form to enable lenders to create customized quotes.

Any lenders who visit the Zillow.com site can view outstanding requests and competing quotes offered by other lenders. By only registered lenders, who have been confirmed as mortgage professionals, can participate in the quote process.

Borrowers can receive as many quotes as they would like; and a standardized quote form enables them to compare quotes and provide ratings and feedback on lenders. Lenders must disclose all fees upfront, while Zillow estimates taxes and insurance and provides an estimated monthly payment. Identities are only revealed when a borrower contacts a lender.

Considering the mortgage crisis the U.S. is currently facing, this could be a very good time or very bad time for Zillow to launch a home mortgage lending service. With both borrowers and lenders gun-shy at this point, perhaps such an offering is a good idea. Both parties can test the waters without revealing their identities and moving too far along in the process.

As long as consumers can locate the service, this should be beneficial to them. They can, without making a commitment, see what rates are available to them before they commit to purchasing a mortgage. Since more and more consumers prefer to conduct their own research (especially online) before making a purchase, this offering should be well received and capitalize on the trend of the Internet-educated consumer.

For lenders, this is a very economical way to generate leads--and strong leads, for that matter. It's unlikely consumers not serious about securing a mortgage would spend time completing a loan request form. Lenders should undoubtedly receive quality leads from this service. Yet, with the ratings and feedback processes in place, lenders must ensure they serve Zillow customers very well--or they will quickly receive a reputation for poor service they won't be able to hide.

It's important to note, however, that the service isn't completely free. Lenders have to pay a one-time registration fee of $25. Then they can create a public profile on Zillow.com that will feature their contact information.

More and more, we are able to see Zillow's business model, which is to generate high traffic with high-interest free content and then enhance that with value-add services that generate revenues. It's a model that seems to be working quite well.

Polk Drives Expansion into China

Motor vehicle information and marketing solutions provider R.L. Polk & Co. last week announced that it will soon offer newer commercial vehicle registration data for China. The data will provide geographic and vehicle configuration detail for customers interested in understanding the commercial vehicle market in China.

The data, which will be available this summer, will be offered by Beijing Polk-CATARC VIC Co. Ltd., a joint venture between Polk and the Chinese Automotive Technology and Research Centre (CATARC). Customers will now be able to receive geographic metrics on commercial vehicle registrations in China by province, city, district and postcode. Those customers, which include commercial truck and engine manufacturers, could previously only receive national level sales and production data.

Polk's China registration data includes a variety of commercial vehicles, including buses, trucks and special vehicles (ambulances, police vehicles, cranes and firefighter engines). Various vehicle specifications will also be included: from gross vehicle weight, vehicle dimensions, dimension of cargo and payload to towing weight, wheelbase, engine model, engine displacement, fuel type, number of wheels and tire type.

Databases that cover China are still very rare in the marketplace, and that really makes this offering quite intriguing and interesting. Still, that lack of such available data doesn't mean there isn't a strong interest in this information. In today's global marketplace, the demand for such data is undoubtedly increasing at a steady pace. In fact, Polk has identified China as one of the largest and fastest growing commercial vehicle markets in the world.

This new offering will effectively expand Polk's international profile and fill a need that continues to grow. "Going global" certainly isn't anything new for Polk, which while headquartered in Southfield, Mich., has offices in countries such as France, Germany and the U.K. The company will most likely explore further development of products in these regions. Perhaps this latest launch will lead to the creation of additional products geared toward the China market.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

"Business intelligence" is a wonderful term, rife with importance, exclusivity and value. That's probably why so many data publishers have rushed to label themselves as providers of business intelligence. The term is assuredly upscale yet at the same time ambiguous, simultaneously promising everything and nothing. It's a dream term for marketers.

Yet I worry about those publishers who think "business intelligence" emanates from the marketing department rather than the editorial department. That's because the future of this business is intimately tied to delivering true business intelligence, and those who think it's a game will soon be out of the game.

Some publishers set too low a bar by believing that more information about a given company in one place constitutes business intelligence. If this is largely a collection of information available elsewhere, it's not business intelligence. It's an aggregation exercise. There's a role for aggregated content, but it simply doesn't rise to the level of business intelligence as I define it: being able to tell users something useful that they don't already know and can't easily find out from any other source.

Your reaction to my definition may be that I am setting an impossibly high bar. But for most data publishers, the jump to true business information is not a big one. It could be as simple as holding onto company press releases that disappear from the web with increasing rapidity. It could be monitoring and reporting how a company's revenues, employees, offices -- whatever -- trend over time. It could be the act of identifying a company's competitors. We know one company that plans to monitor the tenure of a company's c-suite executives to assess stability.

The web has in fact created a limitless content playground for data publishers to source, extract, mix, match, merge, infer, and impute valuable data points and insights that do in fact rise to the level of business intelligence. That's why data publishing is the most exciting corner of the information business right now. We've got the tools and the processes and the skills to create untold amount of true business intelligence extremely quickly, and often at very low cost. So let's all rise to the occasion.