Maybe that's b/c 80% of all websites on Earth are having problems right now?

(Exaggerating, but you get the point...)

How does this relate to Hipmunk's Agony rating? Is that on an absolute or relative scale?

Its an absolute score, we made the transition from a relative scale with this update.

There's more information on our blog in these two posts.

http://seatgeek.com/blog/dev/the-math-behind-ticket-bargains http://seatgeek.com/blog/dev/using-a-kalman-filter-to-predic...

Quite cool, but why does the 'pick a color system' area (which lists the actual values) only have three colors, rather than all five?

At the top you're allowed to select the number of data classes. If you select 5, then you get the 5 colors you see in the palettes.

Good catch, I missed that. Thank you.

What defines the "size" of a company in this context is the number of users/buyers, not the number of listed companies. Thumbtack may have half as many pieces of company info, but I bet the number of users that go to Thumbtack for info is tiny compared to Yelp.

I once read that the Yahoo search ad platform has more advertisers than Google, due to more lax standards. Does that mean that Yahoo ads are bigger than AdWords?

Good point... I also thought the title was very misleading, and just lame, to be honest. Also Yelp isn't even in the same space.. Yelp is more for local businesses, not for contractors. Thumbtack is more like Angies List.

When you're building a marketplace, it's important to solve the chicken and egg problem. Search Google and you'll see how Groupon, Airbnb, etc. have solved this problem. Thumbtack's approach was to build its merchant base first, then to leverage that merchant base to attract consumers.

So I think you're incorrect to say the "size" of a company can only be measured in terms of the number of buyers. For younger companies, you have to look at which side of the marketplace they are building first and measure that. For mature companies, I think your critique makes sense: it does make sense to look at the overall size of the marketplace, rather than just one side of it.

The video is no longer working.

Huh?

The pslick sound, at the end of every sentence. If you are hard of hearing I can run it through a speech to text program and have it report that "pslick" is not a valid sentence.

It bugs the hell out of me and lots of people do it. Stop it. Its like farting on stage so the mic picks it up. The audience shouldent have to tell others that it is aggrevating.

I think you may be accidentally commenting on the wrong post. I don't see any video or audio on this post's link.

For people in the events/ticketing space, this is a big deal. Zvents doesn't get a ton of press, but they are a major player in how people find long tail events on the web, thanks to the fact they power the local section for hundreds of major websites, particularly newspapers.

Right now, StubHub only has bigger events held at "real" venues, whereas Zvents has an index of long tail events that's perhaps 10x bigger than StubHub's. The thing is, StubHub is a secondary marketplace for tickets, and there's basically no secondary market for these long tail events. So does this mean that ebay/StubHub wants to stop limiting themselves to the secondary market?