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AccountingWeb’s pay to play arm twister for SaaS players

by Dennis Howlett on November 12, 2009

Some of the SaaS vendors have forwarded me an email they received from AccountingWeb which says:

The following is an invitation to take part in a major product for the SaaS market next year and beyond.

In response to overwhelming demand from both our members and the vendor community AccountingWEB is proud to announce the launch of a comparative, ‘at a glance’ guide to web-based business software under the title “BusinessCloud Matrix (Accounting  & Finance)”

The aim is to provide a single resource for accountants and businesses to get a clear overview of the products on offer in what is becoming an increasingly crowded and confusing market. It will take the form of an alphabetical single line synopsis of each participating system.

From the 4th January 2010 AccountingWEB members will be able to review participating software offerings in terms of the functionality offered…

…Each entry will be rated as absent, basic or advanced.

Where possible we will include independent user ratings accumulated as part of the Software Satisfaction surveys and cost per user per month.

Because we appreciate that the various packages are constantly evolving each participating vendor will be able to flag up changes to be verified by our team before the entry is amended. Equally entries will be ‘policed’ by members who will be encouraged to ‘report’ misleading entries.

Total cost for a twelve month presence will cost just £1,500.

As a service to participating vendors Sift Media editorial will be completing a ‘background report’ to flesh out the vendor’s proposition which can be attached to the vendor’s entry in the matrix– see notes below.

This is so wrong at many levels.

  • It is a blatant ‘pay to play’ pitch of the kind that buy side people like myself know is fundamentally flawed. It is bad enough that many of the analyst firms operate this model but here we’re talking media where the advertising agenda is front and centre.
  • The days of feature function comparison died in 1999. It’s a ludicrously simplistic model that tells users almost nothing of value. In any event, responsible vendors provide a basic functional description which should help buyers make an initial decision.
  • AW will argue – ‘ah, but you can’t find this all in one place elsewhere.’ That’s the less than subtle vendor arm twister. If you’re not on the list, you’re invisible. Right? Wrong. SaaS vendors are proving adept at leveraging SEO.
  • Modern vendor assessments are way more than simplistic lists of this kind. Regular readers will know that I place the emphasis firmly on references and buyer recommendations. That takes away at least some of the buying risk. These days, those recommendations are easily found on the Internet. Vendors will naturally leverage them so why do I need to spend £1,500 with AW?
  • SaaS players are finding that vertical markets offer a better route to market than simply being ‘another’ book-keeping system. No feature function listing can accommodate that model.
  • ‘Ah but we have major distribution.’ Yes – but who reads AND acts upon what AW says? That’s the big question. Like many communities, AW has plenty of subscribers but only a handful are active and even then all have an agenda of one kind or another. It would be a fool indeed who made a buying decision based on one data source. In the real world it doesn’t happen.
  • Readers might say: ‘Ah but you’re media…you’re just griping.’ Yes, AccMan is media but no, I don’t do and never will do pay to play. Sponsors who choose to use AccMan are paying for real estate where they can showcase content. That’s a very different value proposition. Those services I do review are done with no vendor input beyond explaining what they offer. Vendors always have a right of reply but that comes in comments, not in my copy. That allows for total transparency between AccMan and vendors. Can AW say the same in this model? I think not.

UPDATE: It turns out AccountingWeb has done no sense testing with potential readers/buyers. They’ve simply cobbled it together internally. Their argument is that it will give smaller vendors visibility for their money: QED – pay to play. As I thought.

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  • I agree with having an advertiser pay money to lease a area of a site, but like many have said, I do not like when the owners promote them as if they truly back up a product or service for sponsorship. It tears the credibility and weakens the brand.
  • philipcopeman
    Thanks for this article Dennis. Well Said.

    With turbocash.net I have been in the Accounting Market for over 20 years. It is notoriously difficult to enter. Every few years or so a bunch of new entrants shows up, kick up the dust and when nothign happens, they quietly retreat.

    Cloud Computing seemingly offers an opportunity for new entrants, but is more likely to turnout to be just a reshuffle of the existing players. I see Cloud computing as an adjunct to Accounting, like POS or CRM. It is wishful thinking to believe that this is a Major shift. I would not wish to be a "Cloud Only " offering.

    If you do want to run a comparison site then at the very least you would want to have the major players positioned - we would be the anchor tenants . Now you won't get me to pay for this, so it is unlikely that you would get Sage, Intuit or MYOB to pay, this is going to leave you with less thatn 10% of the market to play with.

    Further Feature tick boxes are irrelevant. All Acocutning systems do all features. Features no longer drive the Acocunting market. What drives the market is the Human capital of the systems knowlege that is out there in the users. We are all ahead of the users in features - getting a little bit more or less ahead is close to irrelevant.
  • Hi Tom,
    Let me preface my comments by saying I'm a long term fan of AccountingWEB. When we first launched Twinfield in the UK, AW was the first place that we spent on marketing, and the resulting, successful campaign gave us a great kick start in the market. The numbers you quote above are impressive, and there is no doubt you get to the target market the accounting/ERP SaaS players want to reach.

    As it has been explained to me, the matrix will only have the information you request on the order form that we SaaS players have just been sent. That means we have a pretty good idea of what the resource will look like. It has been explained to me that the editorial staff will vet the the responses, but each function only has the options "present, absent, advanced" with no additional commentary.

    When I asked if this had been sense tested by prospective buyers and accounting practices, it was explained that it had been reviewed by the editorial team and Sift personnel, with no mention of anyone external. I'd be really interested to hear the views of the buyers.

    So my view comes down to two things. That the matrix needs to cover more than the raw data you are collecting, and become a resource where the buyer can get a much more comprehensive picture of the vendor and what their customers think of them. That you should find a better way of monetizing it.
  • So no pretence at making an objective assessment of the key things upon which buyers would have to rely?
  • Fact checking to the extent that the John Stokdyk and the rest of the editorial team will be involved to monitor responses, but that's not the same as an industry analyst's perpective. The choice between "present" and "advanced" can only be subjective, without any presentation of the underlying facts. Even in a tick list ITT response you get the cance to add a comment to explain. The idea definitely needs more buyer input, and more flexibilty on the data held.
  • StuartJones
    These comments say it all:

    It is a blatant ‘pay to play’ pitch.

    AW has plenty of subscribers but only a handful are active and even then all have an agenda of one kind or another.

    Spot-on Dennis.
  • tomdunkerley
    Dennis - let's be entirely accurate about what this AccountingWeb deal really offers which I'm not seeing entirely reflected in your 'play for pay' generalisation. As I have communicated with you separately, this is a 12-month marketing solution to SaaS vendors to promote themselves to the AccountingWEB community of 100,000 registered members, 170,000 unique users who generate 6,000 comments a month and 1 million page impressions.

    This is emphatically not an editorial product and will not under any circumstances be positioned or presented as such. The editorial team here wouldn't let that one go through unchallenged even if we wanted to go down that route! It's 'play for pay' as you choose to put it only in the way that any vendor on any one of hundreds of publishers web sites can place a white paper for download or produce an advertorial or publish an advertising supplemement etc (all activities that have keep freelance journalist occupied and employed for many many years.)

    Far from having concocted this internally as you suggest, this is a solution based on direct commentary and consultation with accountants and vendors and our editorial team. The feature/functionality ranking aspect is something that's being looked at very carefully as we're perfectly aware that you can't just map old ways of review/assessing products onto the new Cloud model. We haven't gone public on how that will work yet so I'd ask you to withhold any views on that until you've got all the details.

    We don't expect everyone to sign up to this. What we do expect is that this area will have a lot of visibility on the site, some decent traffic and ultimately some ROI. In addition we will be developing:

    *a dedicated SaaS forum for accountants and vendors

    *a free-to-air content library so that every vendor can post their articles/opinion/papers/research for free

    *Our editorial team on AccountingWeb and BusinessCloud9 are working closely with BASDA on its Cloud SIG and contributing to the debate around its role and parameters.

    *regular comment and opinion from editors

    *and most importantly, regular visibility to an email subscriber base of 72,000 opt-in members and 170,000 unique users per month.

    We're trying to create a solution that offers a year-long presence that's both affordable and effective, that serves the accounting market. And yes,we've deliberately kept it simple.

    That said this model will evolve and change as we receive more feedback from the community. For example, we're running a fringe event at our Business Cloud Summit in early December, where a panel of accountants will take questions from SaaS Vendors. As ever, we'll be shaping our future marketing propositions based on this and other community research and comments from our readers.

    Tom Dunkerley
    Sift Media, Head of Sales & Marketing
  • Hold it one second. My piece was based upon vendors coming to me less than best pleased about this attempt at pay to play so let's not be throwing around 'fairness' when I was given access to emails from AW.

    But even then you're entirely missing the point which others have recognized. It's pay to play by a media company with the not so subtle 'absent' arm twister. By your own admission, AW is now in the business of providing marketing services so where's there any objectivity upon which readers can rely?

    This information should be FREE, not paid for based on a 'list' of subscribers which I can guarantee will be laughably inaccurate. (Hint - I've been involved with this kind of thing in the past.)

    As to the panel thing. Haven't you got that the wrong way around? Read back and you'll see what was said about that other farce - the SoftWorld panel.

    I wouldn't mind the 'comment and opinion' bit from editors if they actually understood this market. Quite frankly almost nothing I've seen indicates more than a bare scraping of understanding about a market which is wholly different from what's happened in the past. It's a totally different model whereas AW is merely replicating things it's done before. Zero imagination, zero understanding. As one person said: "AW saw an opp to make a quick £75K with almost no effort."
  • I was called by AccWeb, and made a similar point to David Terrar's final comment. Basically, it's a manipulative proposal – Dennis's pay-to-play description is great. But I also accepted we may have to look at it.

    "Your competitors are there, so you have to be."

    That's really easy to say 'no' to on principle. But if our competitors are visible do we have to be there too? Perhaps. As one of the targeted "smaller vendors" we could be easily cowed into this sort of thing. We need the visibility.

    But the thing is we vendors are talking to each other. This means the scenario of vendors being played-off against one another that David outlines should not happen. The BASDA SIG is a good arena, and there are generally good communications anyway. It's up to us all to say yes or no as a group.

    Getting back to the actual proposal, it’s not brilliant on the whole. I think Duncan hones in on the problem – having been backed by big-spenders feature lists are a bit discredited. If someone is interested they'll do more than check a list of features (at least I hope they will). Sure there are sundry additional elements, but can they justify the spend? I doubt it.

    A site collating all the information in an unbiased way, with collaboration from all vendors, which invites users to become active participants? Now that I like.
  • You know I agree with you on this, and AccountingWEB tell me I was the first person to respond back and whinge. AccountingWEB's argument is that a small SaaS player gets a presence on their site for a year for the modest sum of £1,500. They have a point, but I still don't like this sort of "pay to play". Like all media operations they are struggling with shifting from the old broadcast advertising revenue model to something new. However, I can't help feeling they, or someone, has a real opportunity to make a good SaaS resource for the UK, pulling in the available sources, case studies, allowing customer commentary, that sort of thing.

    In any case this will be, in my opinion, a very crude matrix that isn't going to be much help. It will show a buyer which providers do multi-currency, or stock, and other high level characteristics like that, but not much more in the form that I've seen. Admittedly, even that level of information is difficult for a buyer to compile, but this could/should be more than that.

    Twinfield may well end up paying over the cash to be visible, and I guess a lot of my colleagues will too, but there has to be a better way of monetizing it than that.



  • So if I said - OK, I'll put this together and charge £25 a month for the cost of updating and inclusion of various weblinks - would that work?
  • That sounds more like it.
  • Agree with you on this Dennis. The web is already awash with software "comparison" sites that all end up with the same old vendors who have the budget and desire to participate in this type of marketing. Buyer's using this type of service are missing out on some real gems.

    There does seem to be an opportunity for a site that provides an unbiased list of SaaS/cloud apps for business with user reviews and ratings. Shame AccountingWeb has gone down the route of paid listings and feature focus.
  • To be fair, AccWeb aren't the only one's piling into the SaaS / Cloud market with $ signs spinning in their eyes... the market is going to be awash with cloud events next year, and suppliers are being bombarded by offers / arm twisters / etc...

    All the more reason for suppliers to talk to each other - hence the BASDA Cloud SIG for example - so we can ensure we don't get played off against each other! It's just like Softworld did some years ago, and that's when we formed the Marketing SIG.

    The big disappointment for me in this approach is the 'feature function' ticklist - just because we have the first fundamentally new applications technology since the early 1990s (open, client server) doesn't mean we have to go back to the early 1990's for marketing approaches! I'm def with you there, Dennis!
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