Vantaggi
- It is a company, and it does employ some humans. - Dogs
Svantaggi
- It is a company, and it does employ some humans. - Dogs Avvo is effectively a zombie company that has been hijacked and piloted in undeath by a parasite called Internet Brands, who has spent the better part of 6 years dissolving it through a potent mixture of incompetency and a level of executive disconnect that should be studied. This isn't isolated to any one level of leadership, but rather, it's a rot that has permated this company so thoroughly that I see no viable recovery. Internet Brands is not an entity that sustains. It consumes subsidiaries until they're a hollowed out shell of a company that is ultimately merged with an adjacent vertical. Avvo is simply another casualty in the portfolio. This company was founded in an era when they had no competition and benefitted from a lack of need to innovate their product for a long time. Unfortunately this was handled as a "forever" approach and any of the recent half-baked attempts to make it even remotely marketable have been a clear demonstration of the fact that Avvo is a tech company that struggles with both the tech part, AND the appeal to customers. "Innovation" is just the same product someone just gave the landlord special by slapping a coat of paint on it, and calling it new. This is only made worse by the OBSCENE price increases that are so high you will see entire otherwise highly active markets in major metro areas with zero advertisers. This is money on the table and avvo is so focused on anything but making money, it seems. Instead of pricing markets by demand and availability, Avvo has transitioned to a pricing structure that ASSUMES value regardless of demand, and when this is coupled alongside markets that are already low on advertisers, the higher and higher pricetag all but ensures those markets will remain devoid of advertisers indefinitely. To put it simply, when you have one active advertiser in a market with 10,000 searches per month on average, there is no incentive to advertise, and the prices are out of sync with demand. Unfortunately no amount of data, analytical facts, or persuasion can change this because management is too busy trying to glue felt and little pom poms to the attorney profiles to call it a new product, while completely neglecting the reason why attorneys even have paid profits at all: the advertising viability. Their profiles mean nothing if there is no advertising influx to make them worth the absurd pricetag they've attached, and the hard reality is their own index performance is so bad that there's no real incentive beyond whatever residual clout Avvo has left from its heyday to actually drive any new revenue. Even longtime loyal customers have dramatically scaled back or outright left Avvo's platform, and I can't fault them for it. Avvo tried to measure marketing success on contacts alone, but contacts do not indicate client conversions, and the overwhelming majority of contacts are spam, people calling the wrong practice, or who simply can't afford to hire an attorney. This is such a pervasive issue that it can't be blamed solely on a financialy strained consumer market. While that does amplify problems, the crux of the issue is a terminal disconnect within Avvo, and a repeated lack of action in areas that otherwise would not be any issue at all, we're it not for the convoluted and ineffective bloat within the command structure that all but ensures any simple, reasonable, quick to execute change is rendered impossible—either due to bad communication up that chain, or none at all. These are changes that once could be done quickly and more directly, with less middle men mucking it up, as there was a time when the people who identify an issue could easily connect with the people who could fix the issue and get it done together, but that era is long over. You can raise the alarm until you are blue in the face, but you will never see any resolution.