Sick State
The days of advertising your product are long gone. Recently, unless you can offer up-to-date comparisons of your product with your competitors’ product, you don’t stand a chance.
And then, of course, there are those who don’t actually have a product on the market, but specialise in the comparisons. The trouble is, there are so many comparison websites out there, which one should you use? They all have their advantages and disadvantages. So how do we know the comparison site we’re using is the right one?
If you can’t see where I’m going with this, you are a very generous reader to slow your brain whilst reading and receive the full force of my point.
Why doesn’t somebody just launch a comparison website comparison website? You know, comparethecomparisonmarket dot com or comparisonsupermarket.com?
If now, you’re thinking “well, why stop there? Won’t we then need comparisons of the comparison websites of the comparison websites?” then you are absolutely right. There’s no end to the potential distance we could get from companies selling actual products and services. It’s fashionable to not sell anything at all. At best it could be called the sale of convenience, but I refuse to believe that comparison websites are as accurate as checking all the insurance companies “by hand” and getting the prices and features yourself. And sacrificing accuracy for convenience is just bad practice. Television advertisements cost a fortune and you only really see well-known brand names and corporations purchasing advertising time, particularly in prime-time evening viewing. So that means these comparison websites are making enough to be able to firstly afford the adverts, and secondly to justify roping in more people (meaning that, somehow, these bastards are making money out of nothing).
Just checking a few of the websites I know off the top of my head, comparethemarket.com and moneysupermarket.com had adverts. Not very obvious or intrusive ones, nor were there many on each page. Gocompare.com did not have any adverts, neither did Tescocompare.com, and uSwitch.com’s didn’t come out until a few pages into their site. So that’s not where they get their revenue from. Then, of course, it twigged.
uSwitch.com has agreed deals with some suppliers across all our services to receive a small commission payment when a customer chooses to switch or apply for a product through us.
Each insurer pays us an introductory fee per sale. We don’t charge you in any way - not even a penny, and unlike some other price comparison sites, we do not charge insurers to advertise on our site, they only pay us when a sale has been made.
And there we have it. It’s plain, old-fashioned salespeople commission. Only salespeople have been replaced by faceless websites, because you can’t doubt a website. You can doubt a salesperson, and each salesperson has a given persuasive power. They’re not certain. They’re flawed. But a website? That can be an engine, something incorruptable.
But it’s all lies anyway, so fuck it.
on August 15th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Your idea is good, but you’re too late!
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/insurance/compare-cheap-car-insurance - he even gets commission from the metasites’ sales; he has a list of utility comparers, too.
Mr. Lewis’s website is worth a look if you didn’t already.