In case it's helpful, I wanted to chime in with the Internet Brands perspective. My name is Stan Holt. I head up the publishing team at Internet Brands, and I've been working closely with Jason since the acquisition.
Needless to say, I am a big fan of the site, having come across it when I began researching my next car purchase, which will probably be another Honda Civic. I manage the editorial team at CarsDirect.com and Autos.com, so I thought I had a good handle on hybrids, but 45 minutes on GH reminded me that a community site offers insights and data that traditional editors can never match.
I thought the discussion boards were very useful, thanks in large part to moderators who kept the dialogue on-topic, injected personal and industry knowledge where appropriate and provided something lacking in many discussion-driven sites -- a kind of institutional memory that allows you to quote or paraphrase comments or data that may have been posted months before, providing a rapid response to the person asking the question while sparing regular contributors from having to answer the same question over and over again.
Another thing missing from many community sites is structured presentation of the collective wisdom. GreenHybrid's Real Hybrid Mileage Database seems to me to be the perfect wiki-like application for the automotive area. We plan on promoting the database as much as possible in the links to GH we put on CarsDirect, and it has been a prime talking-point when we've walked through the site with press and partner contacts.
In conversations that Jason and I have had with moderators and power users, we've been asked what GreenHybrid is going to get out of the deal. Other than additional infrastructure and development resources, the best answer is traffic and content. The traffic part is pretty straightforward -- we plan to generate a lot more contributors and readers to the site -- but let me elaborate a little on the content.
CarsDirect has what we like to think of as the most comprehensive and accurate pricing and spec data in the industry (as the only independent automotive ecommerce site still alive, data is even more critical to our bottom line than it is to research sites like Edmunds and KBB). While I would never want to undermine GreenHybrid's community focus, I think some GH users would welcome optional access to the specs, photos, pricing and other research content. If they're interested, they can pursue that info; if they're not, they won't click. Initially, we'd just link to CDc for that content, but the goal is to integrate it into GH so that users don't have to leave the site if they do want research content.
Other content that could be useful to the community includes our options configurator and compare tools, as well as our reviews and review summaries. The compare tool, for example, offers detailed comparisons on an unlimited number of models or even trims, so you can
compare a Highlander Hybrid to a Ford Escape Hybrid or, if you really want to get detailed, stack up
every Highlander Hybrid trim.
I don't want to ramble on too long. I just wanted to share some initial thoughts and get out there how excited I am to be working with Jason and the team that built GreenHybrid. We really hope to expand the site's resources and audience, and I hope as much of that team as possible stays involved for a long time.
Re: Greenhybid.com Sold
