http://www.sciencelive.org/component/option,com_mediadb/task,view/idstr,OX-tag_2009_02_09_172102_812_manstud_bab2008_audio/Itemid,96

Simply put, in a room full of people, you can achieve the maximum price for a finite resource. You could think of this as, “you get to sell the dumbest person in the room”. Where resources are not finite then aiming for a median price works better for the reasons above. Google et al can create enough liquidity to make a ‘market’ work.

Foreign companies list on US stock exchanges for the same reason – there aren’t enough buyers and sellers in their local market.

Creating a market is only for the super-big and by their nature, they are only going to appear when there is complete supremacy in a niche. So I guess the question then becomes – which markets have enough liquidity to make an auction work? Adwords, bing, ebay et all make their money be charging for access to their market. The next best thing to being a market is figuring out a way to win in that market. I guess there is a lot of work that could be done in integrating tightly with these guys. In an ideal world, Google would allow advertisers to buy ‘enhanced’ profiles on Revahealth while creating ads.

Reverse auctions seem easier to establish. Voices.com, elance.com, odesk.com have all achieved this. Many small businesses don’t know what a sales pipeline is, much less conversion rates and average dollar value. They can however understand the concept of bidding on an real piece of work. At a guess, I’d say this is a much better strategy to pursue, especially when still in a growth phase.

i’ve been bidding for position in SERPs on sites using the ‘auction model’ since the days of pre-Google search engines such as Go — for me the most important factors are 1) the bidding process should work smoothly, and 2) the bidding process should be stable

the first few months we were with Reva, the scripts were so slow it was near enough impossible to do ‘test’ bids against competitors — just to make simple changes to our bids on a dozen treatments would take the best part of a morning, most of the time being spent waiting for pages to refresh or windows to open and close — methodically checking out how our bids fared against competitors wasn’t an option

then followed a period where the speed of response improved, but there were numerous minor problems with changes in the method used to implement bids — sometimes it was necessary to phone Reva to find out how to change our bids, as the links and buttons were not merely counter-intuitive but actually misleading (eg they were no longer active, or hadn’t yet been implemented)

currently the bid ‘position’ shown after ‘saving’ a new bid seems to stay the same regardless of how much one bids (whether €1 or €999), which means one is bidding blind — of course one could run tests by doing searches, but in the past the the theoretical position shown on the bidding page has not always been reflected in the actual position in the search results — and now, according to the positions shown on the bidding page, it’s possible to have a higher country position for a bid than for a town within that country, which is hard to make sense of

during the periods of relative stability it’s been possible to monitor competititors’ bids, and prices would start getting higher — but then there’d be more changes and more problems, and prices would drop back to base levels again — it’s as though the software never gets out of beta before a new version comes along

of course, i’ve no way of knowing whether other customers have had similar problems — perhaps you’re right in thinking the size of the market and the nature of the customer is such that an auction model is not appropriate for Reva — but, to be blunt, it sounds to me a little like an attempt to shift the blame on to the customer for failures in product design

however, to end on a more positive note — the postings on Twitter, and here on the blog, have been an important factor in reestablishing Reva’s credibility after some disheartening experiences bogged down in our account management pages