Demand Satisfaction!

There’s been a bit of noise around our company lately, and one of the issues that came up had to do with the way we placed ads across our site. And we’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with it is this: We’ve removed all the ads from Get Satisfaction. Huzzah!

It’s quite probable that you’ve never even noticed that there were ads on Get Satisfaction. The implementation was pretty light, and they mostly appeared to folks who didn’t have an account on Get Satisfaction.

There are a number of reasons for this change.

First, the way we’ve been doing ads in doesn’t quite fit our business model. We’re not out to make money on impersonal advertising. Generic Google ads have their place, certainly, but they seem out of place on our site. We’re focused on customer service and community. We should stick to that.

Second, it doesn’t really fit who we are, our culture. That’s an easy one. We don’t do everything by democratic vote, but we did go around the room on this one a number of times, and we seem to all be in agreement that we’re not big fans of generic ads. They’ve previously only existed in some sections of our site, and sometimes only when people find us through organic search. Now, they won’t appear anywhere.

Third — actually, this one is the most important. There’s no special order to this list. Some of our customers didn’t like the ads as they appeared. And by customers I mean both companies that subscribe to our Basic and Premium services and those companies that don’t. Free, Basic, Premium — it doesn’t really matter what your level of participation is in that respect: The point is that we’ve gotten feedback that our customers don’t dig ads, at least as we used them. We seriously value that kind of feedback, so we’re going to change direction based on it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, so we’re going to make it work that way.

The long and short of it is that we want to aggressively move to please our customers. Stay tuned for more changes. We get an impressive amount of feedback, and we’re always trying to match that feedback up with the services that we offer. We’re intently focused on meeting the needs of the companies that use our service, and we want to be agile and respond to their needs. So, if you’ve offered feedback in the past, please know that we’re still considering a lot of different options about how our site works and how we can make it easier for companies to participate. If you haven’t offered feedback yet, let us know what you’d like to see as a company using our site. We truly love getting all the feedback.

How long will it take to make this change? It’s immediate. When we decided to make the change I asked Scott, our Jedi-strength developer, “Is this a simple change?” He dead-panned right back at me: “It’s a four-letter change. From ‘false’ to ‘true. He typed T-R-U-E and hit return.

Now, there are no more ads.