Comment by vgeek

Users are broken into two separate buckets: industry and consumers. Industry users keep using the site, based on the number of visitors with 50+ visits coming in directly every weekday. The site also gets cited by organizations with regard to their fees and rankings within geographies. This kind of proves the utility for at least this demographic.

Consumers, for a product such as mortgage, will be fragmented and infrequent users, who will only be in-market for a mortgage for a ~3-6 month window every X years. For this audience, discoverability is what matters-- and they will simply go to a search engine and look for "cincinnati mortgages" for which Google will gladly show 8-12 ads with CPCs of $20. An objective ranking based on rates and fees is useful for the consumer, but not an ad network who would rather drive multiple clicks on paid ads. Being objective and useful isn't enough to play in the space, unfortunately.