Founders at Work.pdf

370 Founders at Work
Livingston: What other things did your customers misunderstand about
TripAdvisor, since it was the only one of its kind?
Kaufer: I don’t know that they misunderstood too much. Today, user reviews are
in many spaces a matter of course. Amazon has done a tremendous job turning
that into a significant competitive advantage. In 2001 or 2000, Yahoo wanted to
get more than (I’m making up the numbers) $20 million dollars for a 3-year
Travelocity contract; they wanted to get $40 million dollars. They wanted to sell
a sponsorship to Carnival Cruise Lines for a million dollars. They wanted to
monetize their existing travel channel as opposed to improve the content by
licensing with TripAdvisor.
It wasn’t until around 2004 that we looked at Yahoo Travel as a competitor.
It didn’t change in 2000; it didn’t change in 2001. I mean, the ads changed.
They got better at extracting more money, I guess. But the actual content—the
reason to go there—didn’t change for 3 years straight. It was great to have them
as a competitor, in the sense of, you know, pathetic. In 2004 they said, “Whoa!”
and really made dramatic improvements, and they built a much better product.
Livingston: Did your writers edit the users’ feedback submissions?
Kaufer: No.
Livingston: How did you monitor the entries? Could people say, “This place
sucked! Don’t go there.”
Kaufer: Yes. “This place sucked. Don’t go there. Found rats under the bed.”
Very colorful comments on all sorts of stuff. We’d frequently get threatened by
hotel operators who were unhappy with the reviews that were posted.
We look at all the user reviews that come in every day and make sure they
meet our posting guidelines: Is it family friendly? Are you using hate speech? Is
there racist commentary? We will not edit the reviews at all. We’ll either reject
a review or allow it to be posted.
Sometimes we make mistakes and post stuff we shouldn’t. But those are the
mistakes. We’ll let the horrible reviews come in and, obviously, post the great
reviews as well. If a hotel complains, “Hey, this person is lying about my property.
They never stayed here. We never had any record of anyone staying here,
blah, blah, blah,” we say, “We have a form on the site where the hotel management
can post a response, so that our visitors can see both sides of the story.”
But we won’t take down a posting if a hotel owner complains. And we make no
attempt to verify the factual accuracy of a review. From our perspective, we
have to be a little concerned about libel laws, and we fall under the sort of communications
act that says we’re a conduit for consumers talking on the Web.
You can’t sue AT&T for hate speech said on the phone line that they own. You
can’t sue TripAdvisor for libelous statements that appear on user reviews.
Livingston: Can you think of one example where someone wrote a really
scathing review, and the hotel got mad at TripAdvisor?
Kaufer: There was a hotel owner in Italy who had their attorney draft a letter to
us, actually all in Italian, saying essentially, “If you don’t take this review down,