Thumbs Down on Tagvillage’s Tag Auction
Aug 2nd, 2011 | By askralph | Category: Lead ArticleAfter 2 days, having watched the Tag Auction in action, I have to give it a great big
…….. thumbs down ………
Now we await the Item Auction where realworld products and services will be sold, but
I’m not holding my breathe on that one either. At least there, when you win an Item auction
you WILL get something of much greater value than what you have paid (unless you put
in the vast majority of the bids for it – then you’ll about break even.)
My assessment of the Tag Auction is that it is an all around losing effort and has
been a waste of time for tagvillage programmers. It adds no value to tagvillage.
Who wins in a Tag Auction? Who loses?
Winners
1. Owner’s of overpriced tags who want to get rid of them.
2. Those who win auctions WHEN no one buys the tag back from them WHEN ultimately
advertiser’s pay for using the tag. (Advertiser will be paying for the use of tags in the Item Auction and it
will expand greatly whenl the Search and Social platformsof tagvillage come
online.)
3. Those who play the game for the fun of it and get a thrill from being in an auction
right to the end with a chance to win.
Those who profit slightly
1. Those who win auctions and then haves the tag bought get their normal 15% profit
on the sale – the same profit they would get for purchasing any tag and selling it.
(The tags are repriced as the total amount of the winner’s bids on the tag plus the
amount they paid for the tag at the end of the auction.) Now 15% is a decent profit,
don’t get me wrong, and right now it appears that most won tags are snapped up as
soon as they are placed back on the market. 2
2. tagvillage
Those who lose
1. Everyone else who bids on the tag with the intent to make money and doesn’t win it.
(I have to chuckle at all those who get excited about the Activity Points they win. So
far after two days, from the comments made by bidders they are getting 5 to 25 cents
in return for every 50 cent bid that they have used. That doesn’t sound like a winner to me.
That sounds like losing 50 to 90 % of what you invest.)
Overall Assessment of the tagvillage Top Secret Project. It’s a loser. Tagvillage should
have stuck to its original plan to develop a search module and social module. Instead,
a few months have been wasted on building the Auction module.
Please comment. Let me know what you think. Why am I wrong in my assessment?
I couldn’t disagree more – you have completely missed the point. The Tag Bazaar is a veritable CASH COW for EVERYONE involved – anyone that participates.
What we have seen so far is short sitedness, as exemplified in this article, by most of the members.
The AP to be made on auctions is ASTOUNDING. Every bid earns AP – and A LOT of it.
The problem has been, people will not spend bids for fear of losing 50¢. These same people will go and spend tens of dollars a day on 10¢ tags and consider themselves winners and “in the money” because their “empire value” has gone up by $5. Those same tags will sit in a state of dormancy until…..???? who knows? Will they ever pay off? How many “duds” are in their inventory? Then they will go out and do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day. Yes, they will offset some of their cost as a few other hopefuls do the same as them, and they sell back $1 worth of tags, and then they have a bidding war up to 38¢ before one or the other grows tired, and quits. And everyone calls this a “successful model” of how to trade tags.
What almost EVERYONE is missing is with the Tag Bazaar, the more bids you place, the more money you make. Yes, it is all tied to AP. But as we saw on Sunday (one of the worst trading days of the week) we managed a 4¢ AP payout.
WHY?
THOUSANDS of dollars worth of auctions were closed. The AP pool was driven through the roof. That COULD happen every day of tag trading. All it would require is for people to realize that if EVERYONE pitches in, and puts 50¢ on the line instead of 10¢ we can close 30 – 50 auctions per day, and people will QUICKLY realize that it pays you to be in the “loser AP pool” instead of actually winning the word. People will earn as much in collective lost auctions,a s the person that puts in a single word and gets it closed for full retail.
This is FACT. Not speculation, hype, or wishful thinking. It happened Sunday. It is straight forward math.
Unfortunately, most people are saying “I am not investing any bids – I might lose! I am not wasting 50¢ on a word I might not win” The sad truth if people would start closing auctions, placing bids and putting some effort into the system, people would be HOPING to lose an auction because the AP payout for the “loser pool” is where the true money is to be made. 4¢/AP was just a tip of the iceberg. Imagine what you could win on an auction if we got AP to double digits?
I’m sorry Ralph, I usually agree with you, but you have completely missed the point of the Bazaar. This could escalate tag trading into a realm people wouldn’t believe – but everyone is so focused on losing 50¢ they just CAN’T see teh big picture. This article is proof.
One other thing I forgot to mention….
So far, the higest numbers i have seen in any single auction is 60 people….that is crap. Out of 14,000 people we collectively managed to pull together the power of 60 people for one auction. Imagine what would happen if we had just 1% and had 140 people in one auction. Those auctions that require $1.44 would close with everyone putting in just a single bid (and 4 other people putting in 2 bids). It would take no time at all for us to close auctions on a regular basis. Imagine if just 2% got involved and we had 280 people putting in a single bid. For the same $5 that people spend on hording 10¢ tags, we could collectively close 20 auctions under $100.
Sorry Ralph, you haven’t SEEN the bazaar yet. With under 40 people trying to drive the entire system as a model – your thumbs down means next to nothing.
One final thought Ralph. Had the developers “stuck to search and social”, who would be paying the AP? How would any of the thousands of hoarded tags everyone is sitting on ever get commissions? Will advertisers pay to come to a site with 14,000 mostly inactive people? Would you if you were an advertiser?
Both membership and activity need to grow SIGNIFICANTLY before that happens. We can’t even get 1% to participate in the bazaar. What would any LOW budget advertiser want with those sort of numbers? We have a long way to go before social and search are effective, let alone functional. Getting people to want to make money would be a good start.
Russell – usually I agree with what you say. I may even agree with your statement “One of your absolute worst articles ever”. I didn’t put a lot of time into trying to make it a great article. I simply sat down and wrote what I truly think and feel about the tag auctions. So it probably is poorly written. However, for some reason I think you think it’s bad because we violently disagree on this one topic.
I give tagvillage more credit than to think that they will ever pay out more in AP credits than they take in. So as far as I can see, until they are bringing in massive funds from other modules, they aren’t going to be able return more than 50 cents per bid in AP credits, even if 1000′s start bidding. More people bidding simply means more tags auctioned and more APs earned so more $ required to pay out. It doesn’t necessarily mean more AP credits earned per bid.
Ralph, your article is perfect! The now active “Bazar” in TagVillage is not even close to the proposed one.
Everything is made (again) just for a handful of members, trying to sell their overpriced tags, and many members should pay for it. With the way TagVillage is managed and developed, I can not see thousands of new and active members joining. Russel Miller is, as we all know, board member in TagVillage. Everywhere else this function would be clearly a conflict of interest, by being heavy involved in Tag Trading (and much more) as an insider. He should resign immediately. Again, your statement about the Tag auctions in the “Bazar” perfectly right!
My explanation of the Tag Bazaar, AP, and how you can profit from it
A Layman’s explanation on making sense (cents) of the Tag Bazaar
http://www.tagvillage.com/villagetalk/#/20110804/a-laymans-explanation-on-making-sense-cents-o-773339/
Russell- really don’t see how you can profit from the tag bazaar- yes I read the article. If we profit from the bazaar then tagvillage loses-which of course makes no sense. The bazaar really needs to be promoted better instead of complaining about lack of participation.
Agree 100% with Wayne. The concept needs to be promoted. The company has not been in contact with the membership. I don’t even know what TV program is about anymore. All I know it is not what I signed up for and it hasn’t gotten better. There is a reason why the Bazaar isn’t successful, no one wants to lose money and 50 cents can turn into hundreds of wasted dollars on a concept that is flawed.
The problem has been, people will not spend bids for fear of losing 50¢. These same people will go and spend tens of dollars a day on 10¢ tags and consider themselves winners and “in the money” because their “empire value” has gone up by $5. Those same tags will sit in a state of dormancy until…..???? who knows? Will they ever pay off? How many “duds” are in their inventory? Then they will go out and do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day. Yes, they will offset some of their cost as a few other hopefuls do the same as them, and they sell back $1 worth of tags, and then they have a bidding war up to 38¢ before one or the other grows tired, and quits. And everyone calls this a “successful model” of how to trade tags.
+1