Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC
As somebody that worked for a competitor and knows a lot about both of these companies, I can&#x27;t say for certain what company is going to &quot;win&quot; local services but I can promise you both of these companies will lose (or I guess you could say Angie&#x27;s List has now already lost).<p>Angie&#x27;s List went from a membership based review service and tried to unsuccessfully turn it into a marketplace which never worked.  In the process they didn&#x27;t invest in their most valuable asset which was high quality reviews of service pros and a lot of consumer trust.  Maybe they are still the best right now for reviews, but that is going to change very soon and this acquisition will just accelerate that.<p>HomeAdvisor is just a sales and marketing company (which has been around since 1999 as its old name, ServiceMagic).  They aren&#x27;t a technology company.  They have huge teams of sales people calling pros and selling them on buying consumer leads.  Consumers fill in their information for a job and their system just matches them with the pre-sold leads from their sales team.  The experience is poor from the consumer side (you often get matched with terrible pros who aren&#x27;t interested in your job) and is even worse from the pro side (they are paying to be matched for a job they don&#x27;t want).  Pros hate it, they churn at huge rates, which is why HA needs a big sales team.  It&#x27;s a business and they make money but it isn&#x27;t the type of business that can grow very big.<p>I&#x27;m not even sure why this transaction is interesting.  Angie&#x27;s List has been trying to sell themselves for a long time and has gotten to the point where their stock dropped enough that this deal today is &quot;good&quot; that was bad a year ago.  HomeAdvisor has been around for 18 years and will go the way of the Yellow Pages in 3-5 years.  Just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.