Should standard ads be relegated to the end of all searches?
Poll: Should standard ads be relegated to the end of all searches?
Total Members Polled: 20
Discussion
The foundation of Pistonheads was the sense of community and it being of the drivers for the drivers.
I think it's a great shame that the ability of the free adverts to attract buyers has been so comprehensively restricted:
1. Put to the back of the queue when sorting by price -after all trade and premium adverts so not in normal price order at all - a totally 3rd class citizen stigma;
2. Do not appear in the map view;
3. Do not appear when sorting by postcode.
Come on Pistonheads!! - remember who your base are and resist going over to the Dark Side of blatant commercialism.
It used to be that all adverts were sorted according to whatever parameter the searcher chose: if you opetd for Price (Hi>Lo) then the ads would start with the highest and end with the lowest.
Not now.
Now you get a mix of trade and premium adverts sorted by pricee followed by standard ads sorted by price. ie standard ads for £5000, say, come after trade or premium ads for £1 even when sorted hi>lo.
The ridiculous result is that standard ads are often on the umpteenth webpage and will likely never be seen by searchers.
This even happens if you sort by advert age - in that case you get trade and premium adverts sorted newest to oldest, then any standard adverts after that.
A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs and quite a cynical way of eradicating the free to users basis of Pistonheads. Its my contention that Haymarket have gone a step to far.
PREMIUM ADVERTS ARE NOT FREE TO MEMBERS - THEY COST £7.00 EACH. Ask me how I know? I am a member and would be charged £7.00 to have more than the 3 pictures allowed in the standard advert.
I think it's a great shame that the ability of the free adverts to attract buyers has been so comprehensively restricted:
1. Put to the back of the queue when sorting by price -after all trade and premium adverts so not in normal price order at all - a totally 3rd class citizen stigma;
2. Do not appear in the map view;
3. Do not appear when sorting by postcode.
Come on Pistonheads!! - remember who your base are and resist going over to the Dark Side of blatant commercialism.
It used to be that all adverts were sorted according to whatever parameter the searcher chose: if you opetd for Price (Hi>Lo) then the ads would start with the highest and end with the lowest.
Not now.
Now you get a mix of trade and premium adverts sorted by pricee followed by standard ads sorted by price. ie standard ads for £5000, say, come after trade or premium ads for £1 even when sorted hi>lo.
The ridiculous result is that standard ads are often on the umpteenth webpage and will likely never be seen by searchers.
This even happens if you sort by advert age - in that case you get trade and premium adverts sorted newest to oldest, then any standard adverts after that.
A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs and quite a cynical way of eradicating the free to users basis of Pistonheads. Its my contention that Haymarket have gone a step to far.
PREMIUM ADVERTS ARE NOT FREE TO MEMBERS - THEY COST £7.00 EACH. Ask me how I know? I am a member and would be charged £7.00 to have more than the 3 pictures allowed in the standard advert.
Edited by ultegra on Tuesday 5th August 12:06
Gotcha, just been reading some of the other threads on this as wasn't up to speed with all the changes - seems Premium are only free to "established" members although not sure what the criteria for that is (length of membership or post count). I can see both sides on this, PH is afterall a business and I think it's hard to argue that "you must give us this for free", putting the free ads back in correct order does defeat the purpose of charging so no one would ever pay. Equally if its makes the search system clunky (i.e. having to make sure you scan through all the pages to get to the free ones as well) then yes it is counter intuitive for those looking to buy - better to just say all ads have same priority in the listing, but make it so there is simply not a "free" option for non active forum members at all, don't see why people should be able to freeload if they don't want to contribute to the "community".
touching cloth said:
don't see why people should be able to freeload if they don't want to contribute to the "community".
And TBH to an extent it does serve to sort the wheat from the chaff to an extent - I've replied to several adverts of established members while most of the non-members adverts don't have a lot of added value to me as they're more aimed at 'general car folks' rather than PH'ers if that makes any sense. although I did buy my car from a non-PHer's advert on here - but then the seller did/does at least read the forums
ultegra said:
The foundation of Pistonheads was the sense of community and it being of the drivers for the drivers.
I think it's a great shame that the ability of the free adverts to attract buyers has been so comprehensively restricted:
1. Put to the back of the queue when sorting by price -after all trade and premium adverts so not in normal price order at all - a totally 3rd class citizen stigma;
2. Do not appear in the map view;
3. Do not appear when sorting by postcode.
Come on Pistonheads!! - remember who your base are and resist going over to the Dark Side of blatant commercialism.
These two are not true, they should appear on the map and when sorted by postcode. If you email me with your advert reference number I will check that your postcode is being recognised correctly.I think it's a great shame that the ability of the free adverts to attract buyers has been so comprehensively restricted:
1. Put to the back of the queue when sorting by price -after all trade and premium adverts so not in normal price order at all - a totally 3rd class citizen stigma;
2. Do not appear in the map view;
3. Do not appear when sorting by postcode.
Come on Pistonheads!! - remember who your base are and resist going over to the Dark Side of blatant commercialism.
ultegra said:
It used to be that all adverts were sorted according to whatever parameter the searcher chose: if you opetd for Price (Hi>Lo) then the ads would start with the highest and end with the lowest.
Not now.
Now you get a mix of trade and premium adverts sorted by pricee followed by standard ads sorted by price. ie standard ads for £5000, say, come after trade or premium ads for £1 even when sorted hi>lo.
The ridiculous result is that standard ads are often on the umpteenth webpage and will likely never be seen by searchers.
This even happens if you sort by advert age - in that case you get trade and premium adverts sorted newest to oldest, then any standard adverts after that.
A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs and quite a cynical way of eradicating the free to users basis of Pistonheads. Its my contention that Haymarket have gone a step to far.
Premium adverts are paying for better exposure and are similar to the featured ads section found on ebay and many other sites in that they will always appear ahead of the standard ads. Not now.
Now you get a mix of trade and premium adverts sorted by pricee followed by standard ads sorted by price. ie standard ads for £5000, say, come after trade or premium ads for £1 even when sorted hi>lo.
The ridiculous result is that standard ads are often on the umpteenth webpage and will likely never be seen by searchers.
This even happens if you sort by advert age - in that case you get trade and premium adverts sorted newest to oldest, then any standard adverts after that.
A wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs and quite a cynical way of eradicating the free to users basis of Pistonheads. Its my contention that Haymarket have gone a step to far.
At the moment there are still some old style adverts in the system which are making it harder to see the divide between the premium and standard adverts but these should all expire very shortly and then the divide will become easier to spot.
We are aware that certain categories have too many cars in at the moment (i.e. 3-series, impreza, etc) and that this can make it difficult to scroll all the way through the list. We are planning to split these categories up in the near future to make them easier to view.
Until this happens we do have the advanced search and filter tools. Both of these will allow you to cut down the list to only the cars which you are interested in (by price, keyword, distance from a postcode, etc) which makes it much easier to look for a car in the busy categories.
ultegra said:
PREMIUM ADVERTS ARE NOT FREE TO MEMBERS - THEY COST £7.00 EACH. Ask me how I know? I am a member and would be charged £7.00 to have more than the 3 pictures allowed in the standard advert.
Premium adverts are free to anyone who was a member of the forums before the new system was launched. If yours are asking for payment then it is possibly because you have used two different email accounts for your forum membership and your classified membership. Again, if you drop me an email with your advert reference number then I will have a look and get it sorted.Hope this helps
ultegra said:
Ok. I have emailed you Mr will - I hope you can fix my glitches re not being recognised as a member and being asked to pay for premium ad, and my ad not registering its postcode in the distance/map filter.
Still think the policy re relegating standard ads sucks though.
YHMStill think the policy re relegating standard ads sucks though.
I hate to be critical because I know from grim experience that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but surely this needs a rethink given the sheer volume of confusion that it's generated? I would have thought the appropriate thing to do would have been to put proper searching, filtering, sorting and so forth in place and THEN putting in a mechanism for making more money from it. All that's happened is to make people think twice about using the ads IMHO.
ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
Edited by miniman on Tuesday 5th August 18:06
miniman said:
I hate to be critical because I know from grim experience that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but surely this needs a rethink given the sheer volume of confusion that it's generated? I would have thought the appropriate thing to do would have been to put proper searching, filtering, sorting and so forth in place and THEN putting in a mechanism for making more money from it. All that's happened is to make people think twice about using the ads IMHO.
ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
The filtering and searching tools are in place and do work very well, but are just not the default way of looking at the classifieds. If I was searching for a £10k Griff, i would go into the Griffith category and then hit the filter button at the top and put in a price range of 9000 to 11000 pounds. This gives THIS page of results, with premium adverts at the top and standard adverts at the bottom.ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
Edited by miniman on Tuesday 5th August 18:06
The problems are twofold, firstly a lot of people don't know that the tools exist or how to use them. Secondly, there has been a lot of confusion about how the positioning works. This has not been helped by the old style adverts which were still in the system and served to make the border between the premium and standard adverts difficult to spot.
Come on folks, there are only 50 Griffs for sale on PH on a good day - wow that's looking at ten whole pages of adverts, more likely four or five as the older adverts may be outdated or aren't selling for a reason
- that's what, two minutes' worth of looking at pretty pictures? Do you really need a filter for that?
Besides if I was looking to spend £10K I'd bl00dy well like to know what £6K or £20K would buy me to get some sense of perspective...
- that's what, two minutes' worth of looking at pretty pictures? Do you really need a filter for that? Besides if I was looking to spend £10K I'd bl00dy well like to know what £6K or £20K would buy me to get some sense of perspective...
Mr Will said:
miniman said:
I hate to be critical because I know from grim experience that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but surely this needs a rethink given the sheer volume of confusion that it's generated? I would have thought the appropriate thing to do would have been to put proper searching, filtering, sorting and so forth in place and THEN putting in a mechanism for making more money from it. All that's happened is to make people think twice about using the ads IMHO.
ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
The filtering and searching tools are in place and do work very well, but are just not the default way of looking at the classifieds. If I was searching for a £10k Griff, i would go into the Griffith category and then hit the filter button at the top and put in a price range of 9000 to 11000 pounds. This gives THIS page of results, with premium adverts at the top and standard adverts at the bottom.ETA - just to expand upon that a little more; think about Google. The entire premise is that they are respected because you get to see the natural results with suitably promoted paid-for results. But you don't see "BBC" being dropped to number 412 just because 411 other people have paid for the word "BBC". If I want to buy, say, a Griffith for around £10,000, I want to see a list of Griffs around £10,000, not a list of Griffs ranging from £5,000 snotter to £20,000 minter that have paid-for ads, and THEN the ones I might actually buy. How will Pistonheads retain its respecability as a place where you can find good cars for sale that have been looked after properly if it appears that £7 will enable people to push anything they want to the top of the listings?
Sadly this is the hallmark of large companies that don't really understand how online communities work and apply traditional publishing methods to them.
Edited by miniman on Tuesday 5th August 18:06
Or a £5000 - £7000 BMW 3er where you get 20 pages and the first non-premium car appears on page 11, which to most people wont exist as they will see 1-10 and presume that's it, Here
Meh, it's haymarkets ball and if they want to deflate it, that's their choice.
Mr Will said:
The filtering and searching tools are in place and do work very well, but are just not the default way of looking at the classifieds. If I was searching for a £10k Griff, i would go into the Griffith category and then hit the filter button at the top and put in a price range of 9000 to 11000 pounds. This gives THIS page of results, with premium adverts at the top and standard adverts at the bottom.
Yes but surely you can see from the volume of questions / comments in this forum that people simply don't notice that there's a filter function? There's so little in the filter tab, why not just put those commands in the sidebar. Better still, a bit of Ajax so the page doesn't have to reload to display the altered results. Of course the holy grail is guided navigation / facetted browsing. No doubt Endeca have been to see you - I personally wouldn't go there because there are lower cost open-source alternatives and the Auto Trader site isn't a shining example of how to make classifieds work - but the principle is sound. My comment stands that the **perception** is quite clearly that a lot of time and energy has been spent on introducing another mechanism to make money, and yet nothing has been done about the usability of the classifieds.
Silent1 said:
Meh, it's haymarkets ball and if they want to deflate it, that's their choice.
Very true. The vast majority of publishers we are working with aspire to having something like PH in their portfolio. Haymarket obviously wanted it badly enough to pay for it - so whey they now seem to continually drag it in strange directions that conflict with the original ethos really baffles me. Edited to correct misquote - Will
Edited by Mr Will on Thursday 7th August 09:28
miniman said:
Very true. The vast majority of publishers we are working with aspire to having something like PH in their portfolio. Haymarket obviously wanted it badly enough to pay for it - so whey they now seem to continually drag it in strange directions that conflict with the original ethos really baffles me.
I don't see it as being in conflict with the original ethos, PH is an enthusiasts site but the classifieds were booming in the wrong direction. They were starting to fill up with shopping trolleys and halfords specials and this is a way of making money from them which can then support the core of the site, the forums and members.This is not the end of the changes to the classifieds, we are aware that the interface is dated and not designed to deal with the volume of adverts so we are making plans to improve this and re-focus the classifieds with a more performance orientated slant at the same time
Mr Will said:
I don't see it as being in conflict with the original ethos, PH is an enthusiasts site but the classifieds were booming in the wrong direction. They were starting to fill up with shopping trolleys and halfords specials and this is a way of making money from them which can then support the core of the site, the forums and members.
That's what I was getting at, sort of. Makes sense to me. 
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