Hi Philip,
I won't comment on your analysis, but your latest statement will be wrong in a couple of days: "As you can see above, there’s nothing different with the Kelkoo product and it looks the same as it did five years ago".
We are currently relaunching Kelkoo in all countries, and the new version is now live in most european countries (FR, NL ...), except UK for the moment ;)
Maybe Kelkoo will do the Techcrunch homepage twice in a week ;)
Nicolas
Oct
03
2007
Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as they call it)
23 Comments
Wow! Yahoo is "diversifying Kelkoo from it's main portfolio and seeing how it stands on it's own" - translation - they're going to flog it!
As you can see above, there's nothing different with the Kelkoo product and it looks the same as it did five years ago. This leaves such a massive space to innovate in and as I've mentioned before - there is a lot more innovation taking place in the ecommerce space. So yes Yahoo, sell Kelkoo or let the team get back together - give them the resource and space they need when they want it - but don't force them into your world.
Oh - and if you're willing to pay - I'm sure the founders could come back and consult for you :-)
- Kelkoo has not innovated since the Yahoo acquisition and has had to deal with the "corporate-ness" of the bigger company. The friends I know who are still there have kind of been indoctrinated and speak the corporate lingo fluently! Bottom line - innovation has given way to trying to satisfy headcount and strict revenue goals.
- The Kelkoo Team has been split up - all the founders have left and the original team was split between all the Yahoo divisions (kelkoo sales merged with Yahoo sales etc...). This had the effect of taking a very knowledgable, passionate, close-knit team - and fragmenting it.
- Traffic generation - part of Kelkoo's success was understanding SEO before any other big player got in the game and then with PPC. About 1/3 of the traffic came from SEO, 1/3 from PPC, and 1/3 from direct to site + other. The market is now much more sophisticated with a lot of the competition becoming clever on the SEO / PPC front. Also, google has been gradually eroding the traffic as part of it's game to try and remove middle men.
- The business model relies on getting traffic in as cheaply as possible and converting as many as possible to merchants who pay high CPC's. There's a big push back from merchants who want to ensure high quality converting traffic and so go back to CPA style deals
- The quality of the traffic it is sending through isn't as high as it good be any more - there is more information they could learn about the user before sending it on.
- They were late getting into the financial comparison marketplace, one which MoneySupermarket has capitalised on nicely.
As you can see above, there's nothing different with the Kelkoo product and it looks the same as it did five years ago. This leaves such a massive space to innovate in and as I've mentioned before - there is a lot more innovation taking place in the ecommerce space. So yes Yahoo, sell Kelkoo or let the team get back together - give them the resource and space they need when they want it - but don't force them into your world.
Oh - and if you're willing to pay - I'm sure the founders could come back and consult for you :-) Comments
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Oct 3 2007 -
Oct 3 2007
[...] Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as they call it) (on Crowdstorm’s blog by Philip Wilkinson, a former Kelkoo employee) [...]
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Oct 3 2007
oooh - I'm intruiged - anything "original" and not copied?
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Oct 3 2007
"original and not copied" difficult to say in this Web 2.0 world. We are still focused on our core features - comparison shopping - but this new release is clearly a foundation for the future. Expect more releases in the coming months, to add interesting features :)
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Oct 3 2007
I'm still there, Phillip, but that's right it would be hard for you to remember me, you were dealing more with the biz guys than with the tech side of the company when you were still around.
As for innovation, that's right the facade did not change that much but the inside evolved greatly, at least in term of scalability and the ability to provides the users ways to search in categories catalogs are impossible to build.
Moreover, there is now a number of APIs for you to use to express the creativity that will move the e-commerce world in the new world of the social networks.
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Oct 3 2007
Hi Remy - of course I remember you! You're one of the founding team too! API's are a good start but a real pity it has taken 3 years to build one! Scalability is also good but a single user isn't going to see the benefits of this. Honestly - we did so much good stuff and innovation 5 years ago and then it all ground to a halt. Don't you ever want Kelkoo to be the leading innovator again?
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Oct 4 2007
So who would buy kelkoo?
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Oct 4 2007
You need to distinguish between 'innovation' and a business. Pure innovation is what happens in universities and big corporate R&D centres, supported by research grants etc. - and you'd be amazed at the kind of crazy shit that's being developed (look at things like quantum teleportation, and the really wacky one Molecular Self Assembly, where chips and circuits are 'grown' from a kind of technical DNA http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,104335,00.html). Note though... none of these will be mature/have any real-world applications for decades.
Phil is disparaging about Kelkoo having been indoctrinated into Yahoo and focussing on revenue creation... but this is a *business* and that's the whole point.
The measure of a successful business in this arena is shaping an innovation or disruptive technology into a consumer product and, ultimately, making a profit from it. Otherwise, go join a university research team and innovate for the sake of innovating. -
Oct 4 2007
Dave - I think you've missed the point a bit here and I'm not saying that no business should focus on revenue - far from it! The point is that the internet business moves very rapidly and if you don't keep enhancing and innovating your product then how can you expect to keep competing?
To give you a solid example, price comparison was actually a pretty advanced technology in 1998 and very unique. Now, it is much easier to do and lots of sites have API's (shopping.com) so you can launch your own. Thus, once it becomes a commodity - you need to think how else you keep differentiating yourself.
Kelkoo has sat on its arse for the last few years which is pretty annoying - for the very reason that they were making good money, had dominant market share, and were comfortable. Google are not even doing this - but innovating every day AND making money.
Ciaron - who would buy it? Following on from the above post - why would you need to? (I'd buy the team and the merchant relations and that's it to be honest).
It's time to set the Kelkoo team free - let them come and join a new wave of ecommerce and be alive again!!!!! Crowdstorm anyone? muhaaaahhhaa -
Oct 4 2007
Maybe true, but enhancing and innovating are intrinsically different things, and I take a much narrower view of what constitutes innovation.
I don't know too much about what Kelkoo have been doing, but it looks like an aggregator to me. Aggregating content itself was an innovation, improving the way it works is enhancing your product. Napster was an innovation, other P2P services are enhancements of that concept.
I would disagree that Google are innovating every day - they didn't invent web search, they've enhanced the way it works. AdWords are arguably an innovation, but not earthshattering - they were a great enhancement to web search on which Google relies for its revenue. So, Google continually enhances its product to keep it cutting-edge, but I wouldn't say they're consistent innovators.
So, what we are saying is that Kelkoo should have enhanced their product, to increase functionality, rather than get too comfortable? Agree there. History is littered with the ghosts of companies who have fallen into the trap of being comfortable with an initially great product for too long (Commodore, anyone?).
As to who would buy it - who can tell? I would value it as I would any other business, based on its revenues and profits. Anything else is speculative (look at Skype...). -
Oct 4 2007
Kelkoo sucks big time. It's beyond usable and never shows the best price. I'm 100% with you Philip. They completely took their eye off the ball.
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Oct 4 2007
Dave - how can you say "Adwords / adsense" was not an earth shattering enhancement?! It not only made a monster mountain of cash for them but fundamentally enabled many more start-ups and publishers to make revenue for their work and innovate beyond belief.
Let's be clear - definitely agree there is a balance to be had between constant innovation and business revenue - but lose the momentum in either case and you're just another "have-been" -
Oct 8 2007
[...] • From the pen of the UK’s Crowdstorm CEO Phil Wilkinson comes analysis of the Yahoo sale of Kelkoo. As a former European Kelkoo UK chieftain, Phil was once intimately acquainted with Kelkoo, so his post is interesting. Namely, he charges Yahoo! with sucking the innovation life out of Kelkoo: “The friends I know who are still there have kind of been indoctrinated and speak the corporate lingo fluently! Bottom line - innovation has given way to trying to satisfy headcount and strict revenue goals.” He also says Yahoo broke up the best teams, losing its lead in SEO and not keeping pace with Google, Oh and add to that list, missing out on the financial comparison marketplace which MoneySupermarket capitalised on. Let’s hope Phil’s friends keep talking to him, despite being turned into corporate drones, poor things. [...]
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Oct 8 2007
The problem I have always had with Kelkoo as a potential user is that I don't trust the site to give me non-biased price comparisons - which for me is the most important criteria. I'm aware that the site makes its money from referral and click-through fees, which leads me to believe that it won't necessarily send me to the merchant offering the lowest price. Kelkoo would have to reassure me that this wasn't the case in order for me to trust it.
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Oct 8 2007
@Simon - very good point. One of the things I pushed through in the early days was to make sure we always at least showed the brand with the cheapest price even if the others were paying - as that's one of the main reasons people use price comparison. I'm actually going to do a post on this now as you've inspired me :-)
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Oct 8 2007
[...] A second point is that a few people use multiple price comparison engines and sites to make sure they really are getting the best price, and this was mentioned by Simon Willison in a previous post on Kelkoo and Yahoo. So, we’ve put some tabs down the left hand side in which you can flick between the results for places like Amazon, Shopping.com, and Kelkoo (with more to come). [...]
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Oct 9 2007
I've worked closely with many of the price comp engines in the UK for seven years. Kelkoo got a massive lead and then flunked it - because of their technology. They had real problems sorting and categorising data and shoppig.com notably outstripped them (they have since in turn been eclipsed by PriceGrabber's superior technology).
Kelkoo - right from the start - was perceived as a low rent partner. But you are right Philip in that they forogt effective R&D. because the portals and media oweners like to work with effective products, and there ain't no traffic quite like cost-of-sale traffic.
btw - after your comments, Crowdstorm had better be good, rather than just another aggregator/adder. -
Oct 10 2007
Scott Wingo from Channel Advisor has done a nice summary article on this topic:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1134650/22301720 -
Oct 10 2007
Also Alarm Clock Euro talks about it and where some of the founders (inc. me and Crowdstorm) are now..
http://www.thealarmclock.com/euro/archives/2007/10/kelkoo_rumor_and_the_1.html -
Oct 10 2007
[...] Philip Wilkinson: Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as they call it) [...]
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Feb 20 2008
[...] has been looking to sell Kelkoo, which operates in 10 European countries, since October last year (here are some good reasons why). Elsewhere, Pricerunner, launched in Sweden in 1999 and bought by ValueClick for £16m, seems to [...]
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Feb 25 2008
[...] has been looking to sell Kelkoo, which operates in 10 European countries, since October last year (here are some good reasons why). Elsewhere, Pricerunner, launched in Sweden in 1999 and bought by ValueClick for £16m, seems to [...]
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Nov 21 2008
[...] UPDATE: Mike Arrington has a good post with more information and the actual update email from Kelkoo MD Glen Drury to the teamPierre Chappaz also announced this on his Kelblog (I ran it through google translator)Profile information on the new mysterious JamplantIt’s also worth looking at my previous post on this topic and Kelkoo’s challenges which are part of the reason for them bein... [...]
