You People Keep Contradicting Yourselves (taylor.gl)

I've been looking into building a comparison site for a certain kind of service. The service is well-established, and commoditized; nothing innovative.

I was initially surprised that there isn't an aggregator out there for it. But now I'm starting to wonder if there's a reason no one's doing it: because everyone is now looking up the answer using ChatGPT & co.

The data for this product rarely changes - whether it's pricing, availability, or product offering. Which means people don't have to worry about the AI answers being out of date. Very unlike the hotel booking comparison sites, which are still thriving.

I probably won't have much special insight, compared to an AI. I'm just a casual user of this service.

The only benefit for my hypothetical comparison site would be the filtering/sorting UI. Problem is, it would be hard to nail it, so asking ChatGippity might be better anyway.

What do you guys think? Is it still worth launching comparison sites these days?

And yes, I already asked Claude about this; it said don't bother - but I don't trust its answer because this topic isn't discussed much online.

Comments (6)

PaulHoule · 10h ago

It's always been a tough market since the time Google got on the scene.

In principal comparison sites could give a lot of value, in practice the vendors want to control the narrative and Google sure as hell wants to extract all the value it can out of the ecosystem. They made the decision to make Forbes.com rank #1 for many comparison queries:

https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

probably because they were tired of brandless bottom feeders fighting for that spot. Today even if you don't intend to use AI Google will probably put trash answers into your search results anyway.

mmarian · 10h ago

Hmm, good point, I assumed it'll be easy to rank well on Google, but might actually be very hard. In which case it won't succeed, as it's not something people discover in their socials (FB, TikTok, etc)

PaulHoule · 9h ago

I think in another post you mention wanting a $50k ARR, that doesn't seem impossible to me but it is a lot of traffic and you ought to back into how much you'd need [x] how much you make per visitor or impression to make that work.

That said, I made a network of sites that were making about $1k a month of ad revenue at the peak which felt very good. This turned out to be a really great demo which looked like something that fell off a UFO and got a recruiter to call which got me the highest paying job I'd ever had to that point. So a site that doesn't make life changing money can still turn out to be a great career move.

mmarian · 8h ago

Right. I'm not sure it would get a ton of traffic, so I was banking more on referral / ad relationships with the suppliers. I've seen it work for a similar service, but that one has the benefit of being more popular, and dynamic.

Well done with the network of sites! Unfortunately I haven't had any luck with my past projects, which is why I'm doing a lot more research this time around.

throwawaysleep · 10h ago

A lot would depend on what you’re looking to get out of it

mmarian · 10h ago

Good question - for me, the goal would probably be to generate somewhere around $50k ARR.