Monday, September 10, 2007

Classifieds

Craigslist turned local classifieds for newspapers upside down.
Cutting prices to the low cost of free for most types of listings.
This has caused a serious financial issue for newspapers.

Today I learned that a large piece of the online ad spend growth is
expected to come from online classifieds in four big categories. Jobs,
autos, misc and real estate.

eBay has been succesful with the pay per listing model, but I'm not
sure that this market isn't headed towards free.

Also, the trend is heading for decentralization of the listings. Sort
of like YouTube for classifieds.

The killer solution seems like an API that accepts listings and a
service that pushes it everywhere you would like it to be posted. For
example, I want to fill out one form, post it to ebay craigslist etc,
have an option to post it to PPC search engines and gives me a widget
to post it anywhere.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm actually working on a free classifieds that's all about free stuff. People giving away what they no longer need. I figure that's the best way to start getting traffic and hopefully media attention, because local newspapers aren't going to want to acknowledge my site otherwise. I'll use Adsense to monetize it. Later down the track (in a year or two) I may expand to other areas, but for now this will be my core 'business'.