Category: AngiesList

The news that IAC’s Home Advisor is merging with Angie’s List to form a new public company is both surprising and not all that surprising. In InsiderPages’ early days, we considered Angie’s List one of our top competitors but we were always baffled why anyone would pay to get access to their members’ reviews, particularly when sites like ours and Yelp’s were giving the content away for free. Back then Angie had the last laugh, as InsiderPages got acquired by…

This post was originally published on Search Engine Land, but I didn’t like how they rewrote the title so here’s the director’s cut: To:           Local Directories From:      Google Re:           Local Search Rankings Hey guys… You may have noticed that over the past year, a lot of the organic traffic to your sites has been… well, we guess the right word is “tanking.” As you know, it is our stated goal…

The big difference between Angie and everyone else is…they charge consumers to see the ratings & reviews.  The cost of taking the time to read everything and meet a number of contractors is much greater than paying Angies List $6/mnth to get a single trusted recommendation. Businesses don’t pay to be listed but they pay to get extra promotion/leads. Anonymous ratings are not allowed. They generate about 40,000 reviews/mnth. They produce local magazines with home improvement, health info and advertisers. …

When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people. Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  One of our then-rivals, Judysbook, came out with a promotion to give away iPods for 100 reviews.  Then Yahoo Local came out with giving away…