Bryant Quan, Slickdeals CEO

Quote from dragonwarrior : she is real but she's a half bot

She is real so stop being rude.

Quote from sleets1 : I think we need an interview with Selma

Perhaps someday she will grace us with an interview.

Quote from bryantq : We do block links to our competitors, but you're welcome to discuss them. The fact of the matter is, it is a choice not to drive traffic to our competitors, especially when many of them steal our and our users' content to begin with. Furthermore, you'll have to take my word for it (or ask one of the merchants), that we do not allow merchants to pay for placement on our frontpage. The only way a deal can get on the frontpage is if one of our deal editors thinks it is worthy. That has always been a part of our frontpage commitment.

I concur. I can't tell you how many times FW and Deal-Snooze grab deals from the SD community and don't even acknowledge those who originally shared it. Sometimes I've literally seen a deal I posted, word for word, copied on another site.

I've never seen paid placement on the front-page, and I check it every day. The only things even remotely "sponsored" are credit-card banner deals by Chase... which are pretty freakin' good deals to begin with. Who doesn't want $300 Cashback just for opening a credit card?

Thanks Bryant and keep up the good work!

Quote from Kamyl : IMHO, SD is within their right to ban their competitors. Afterall, this is about SD, not them. Personally, what I dislike the most of SD is their contest page. It's not fair at all. Liking to Facebook, reputation, SD veteran, time logged, referrals, deal alerts, tweets, etc give an unfair advantage to these people. A contest should be fair all across the board! No one should get any special treatment.

How is it not fair?

Quote from chewspam : How is it not fair?

They have a better chance of winning than everyone else?

Quote from Kamyl : They have a better chance of winning than everyone else?

FYI, and I still have yet to post the picture, I won an Ipad2 recently from SD. I did not tweet anything and I don't even have facebook.

I had a total of 65 entries, mostly because I've been here for years (long before joining...).

Thanks SD!

Quote from Kamyl : They have a better chance of winning than everyone else?

But you can perform the same actions as them, for the most part.

Quote from rman : Brian, I have not seen many sites where the head honcho directly interacts directly with consumers/customers.. for that, I am tipping my hat to you.. I hope you continue to offer an easy channel for them to reach ot you directly like this even as you grow in size -RMAN

I concur.

Quote from coolhand : FYI, and I still have yet to post the picture, I won an Ipad2 recently from SD. I did not tweet anything and I don't even have facebook. I had a total of 65 entries, mostly because I've been here for years (long before joining...). Thanks SD!

Did you missed my point?? I mean, you just agreed with me in this post! Duh!

Quote from cgrady : But you can perform the same actions as them, for the most part.

Right, but there is no equality. Other people have a better chance than others.

Quote from rman : "especially when many of them steal our and our users' content to begin with." Do you know how much of the content on slickdeals is stolen from competitor sites? I am guilty of that atleast couple of times.. when I found a deal on technologybargains.com [sic!] I came onto slickdeals and posted it as payback for all the benefit I have received from this site. So your reasoning doesnt hold water.. as your community is guilty of stealing as much as you are accusing competition of doing the same. frankly, I dont care to argue about who owns content. What I do care about is throttling free speech and you are guilty of doing so by disallowing the very mention of a competitor name. For this reason and no other reason, you [meaning slickdeals] have slipped down several notches from being the most admired. If I were the CEO [sic] of slickdeals, the first thing I would do is to eliminate the banned words when they refer to a competitor. I would have the courage to do that. Question is, do you?

Seems like youre completely off base here

I do not KNOW why slickdeals is the biggest deals website, but i do know that it has very fast forums and it looks up to date, as opposed to FW which i always felt was a mess.

Do people steal deals from other forums and post them on slickdeals? sure, but slickdeals has so many members that post so many deals that theres no way that slickdeals "imports" more deals than it "exports" to other forums. Simply impossible.

Basically i think the popularity of slickdeals goes like this: deal sites pop up -> slickdeals pops up -> slickdeals had the best "infrastructure" to post deals -> it snowballed into the biggest deals site in a positive feedback loop (more members, more deals, leads to more members, etc)

Only real suggestion i can offer to slickdeals is that hot deals is TOO popular, you might want to split it up between "electronics" and "everything else". Threads fly off the first page of hot deals very easily, and i miss some good deals even though they may have lasted a day or two. I like to buy electronics, not so much the whey protein deal that pops up every day or whatnot.

Quote from zeeshansyed : How do they earn through this site? Just the advertisers?

I'm wondering, too. Maybe banner is a way.

Quote from lik3wy : I'm wondering, too. Maybe banner is a way.

All outgoing links to merchants such as amazon, best buy, etc are automatically altered to include tracking information from slickdeals, merchants pay SD average of 4% (guesstimate) of sales to slickdeals. This is called affiliate marketing.

Great post oFlamingo on the interview with Mr. Quan.
Looking forward to interview with Mr. Trac.
TU's and reps.

Quote from Kamyl : Did you missed my point?? I mean, you just agreed with me in this post! Duh! Right, but there is no equality. Other people have a better chance than others.

Sorry, I didnt read your original. I only saw the pull quote. I'm sure SD could do an everyone gets one contest periodically to help the new people as much as the old, or the non-social media people as much the rabid followers.

But I wouldn't. I'd want to reward the people who helped make my site what it was. I'd happily let new people have a chance too, but I'd feel much better playing diablo 3 for two hours with someone who has posted in forums, submitted deals, and helped grow the community way more than people who just created an account because they wanted a free graphics card.

Opportunity is never fair. It happens, you take the risk, you do or do not get rewarded. I cant buy stock in Dell on day one. But I can today if I think it's a good opportunity.

I didnt make a knock off of myspace with my own preferences although I easily could have. Even if I did, would anyone got to it?

If you want to fight for fair, go out and help someone raise their standard of living. It's worth far more than any contest prize to both of you.

Quote from Kamyl : Did you missed my point?? I mean, you just agreed with me in this post! Duh! Right, but there is no equality. Other people have a better chance than others.

Don't feel too bad, I have posted a lot of deals and enetered many contests, I have kinda good reputaion points and I still won nothing from SD, except a couple of T-Shirts when they ran a couple T-Shirt for FP deals a couple of years ago.