RefreshClassifieds

Today we saw 2 announcements for very focused directories.  This is an interesting online trend which highlights the practicality of micro directories.

The first is for Roofing-Directory.com which focuses on connecting consumers with roofing contractors that will repair or replace your roof.   The site supports commercial and residencial roofing companies and is currently available in California, Florida, Illnois, Maryland and Virginia.   Contractors are pre-screened with an assurance from the site that they will provide a free estimate before starting work.  The cost is $10 for a lifetime inclusion for a roofing company and free for consumers.

The second directory we saw was local-attorneys.com, which focus on connecting consumers with legal council in their area.  The site includes a variety of different legal fields and is available in most states.  The cost $50 for inclusion in the directory and free for consumers.

Are micro-directories the future?  With web search it would seem to be a good strategy to use these directories to increase your visibility to consumers.  Its not clear how these micro-directories will stand up in the long term though with consumers not maintaining a relationship between the different sites.  The major directories services build up a level of trust and assurance with consumers so that consumers return and re-use the directory.  It will be hard for these micro-directories to build use trust, their biggest value might be as a SEO link provider.

Ziplocal.com has added reviews from Gayot, WaySpa, The Globe and Mail, EYEWeekly and Sweetspot.ca to its directory service.  Users generated reviews can be a great way for a business to stand out in a crowded directory listing.   The challenge with user generated reviews has always been avoiding people that try to manipulate the system.  By combining reviews from multiple sources it looks like Ziplocal is in a good position to avoid this sort of abuse.

Ziplocal has also added a new feature for restaurants that lets users make a reservation with the restaurant via the OpenTable system.  The system has very few listings in Canada though, with only 92 in the Toronto area.  This could be a great differentiator for the Ziplocal in the restaurant category, which is generally a high use and value category for directories.

Brandan Connell, the owner of Rankrover.com, has launched a new human edited directory to compete with DMOZ.   The new directory site is called Nicadema and features the ability accept reciprocal links and paid options.   Reciprocal links are free and paid options start at $9 and go to $21 dollars for sponsored links.   All payments are accepted via Paypal.

DMOZ , the open directory project, contains about 4.6M sites, 70K editors and receives around 2M unique visitors daily.  The DMOZ has become very big and doesn’t currently allow for paid options to separate advertisers.

Techcrunch is reporting that OLX.com raised $13M from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and DN Capital.  OLX.com aims to compete with Craigslist and other free classified sites but seems.
The most interesting aspect of the OLX business plan is perhaps their partnership to white label their site with Friendster.com, the social networking site.    Unlike the early Oodle partnership with Facebook, the Friendster relationship seems to provide OLX as the exclusive classified site.

OLX.com is also very popular outside of the US and a great web experience for users.    The sites traffic has been relatively flat over the last year and it would appear that a growth strategy for North America is required.

Overall its great to see a Classified sites still getting funding with Craigslist and Kijiji competing so actively.

Homenet Inc and Gumiyo have announced a partnership to leverage the Gumiyo’s mobile platform with the Homenet dealer inventory management tools.  The Homenet Inventory Online service is used by over 12,000 dealers primarily in the US and processes 2.5 million vehicles daily.

A key requirement in the US automotive industry are window stickers which are required in most states and need to be very accurate.  As a result most dealers outsource the inventory management process to third-parties, like Homenet.

Gumiyo provides the ability to view classified information on mobile devices.  Gumiyo users can view small brochures with the classified listings.  Gumiyo can support a variety of classified services but the Homenet service would be focused on the Automotive business.

This looks like a great relationship for both companies, the dealers they service and ultimately classified users.  With increasing pressure from free classified provides its good to see innovative approaches and partnerships.

Autotrader.ca has launched a New Car search and Autotrader New Car publication. Autotrader.ca is the number one automotive site in Canada with 2 million unique monthly visitors and it makes sense that they would expand into the New Car category. The Autotrader New Car magazine will be distributed in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Montreal with 230,000 copies in circulation.

Autotrader Canada has traditionally been a used car source and the brand took over the automotive classified advertising space in many Canadian markets. Newspapers and other media outlets have been forced focus on New Car advertising revenue, and done fairly well off the automotive manufactures.

The Autotrader.ca New Car offering appears to be positioned at giving automotive manufactures more choice with regards to advising. Currently the New Car search is separated from Used Cars but its not clear that consumers make a hard distinction between New and Used when they start searching. In most cases the price point of new cars puts them out of reach but with some incentive programs the cost for a new car is very close. In the future it new and used advertising may share more of the media outlets.

Disclosure: Colin Smillie worked with Trader Corporation in 2007, which owns Autotrader.ca.

Yellowpages Corporation is running a video contest for the funniest Canadian video and offering a $500,000 cash price and $500,000 charity donation.   The contest is part of the Yellowpages.travel site launch with positions Yellowpages Corporation in the travel industry.

Yellowpages.travel focuses on aggregating travel offers from a variety of sites.  Users can complete a single search and get results from :

• Expedia
• Travelocity
• Orbitz
• Priceline
• Kayak
• HotWire
• SideStep
• Hotels.com
• other major travel websites

This is a better experience for users since that don’t have to visit multiple travel sites and positions Yellowpages Corporation in a category where directories have traditionally not done well.

The Kelsey group released on the overall growth of the advertising market.   One of the most interesting aspects was the projection that Yellow Pages advertising would grow to $41.4 B, with a combination of the print and online sales.

Through 2007 to 2012 The Kelsey group predicts we will see the following:

• Local search revenues will grow from US$2.1 billion to US$6.6 billion (25.5 percent CAGR).
• Print Yellow Pages revenues will decline from US$27.5 billion to US$25.6 billion (-1.4 percent CAGR).
• Internet Yellow Pages revenues will grow from US$3.7 billion to US$9.2 billion (20.1 percent CAGR).

We don’t think there’s any surprise here in regards to the overall trends with print advertising declining and online advertising increasing.   Over a 5 year spread we would have though the divide would be greater though, with many consumers moving away from the print based directories.

One area of surprise was the Kelsey prediction that Yellow Pages print revenue in Canada would actually increase at 1.5%.  We have a hard time understanding this trend and suspect it might just be a revenue reporting issue with the Yellow Pages group in Canada that is distorting the values.

BusinessDirectoriez.com launched today with a focus on providing SEO links related to key topics to business sites.  While directories have long been a good source for quality SEO links we haven’t seen such an aggressive SEO focus before.  The sites lets business purchase links related to specific keywords.  For example “Motorcycle Trader” is one of the top links and actually links off to “www.usedmotorcycleforsale.ca”.

Pricing for links seems to be flat rates right now at $2 per link but the site pricing uses a bidding system.   Businesses will be expected to bid on popular keywords.  The Site also features deep links to increase your keyword ranking in search engines.

While the site is fairly well designed its not clear  how they hope to maintain any user traffic with the SEO business model.  Without some user traffic we don’t think it will be too long before search engines start to decrease the relevance of these links and the entire Business Directoriez.com site.

Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., The New York Times Co., and Tribune Co. announced this morning the arrival of quadrantONE. quadrantONE is a new joint venture to sell national online advertising inventory across all of the web properties belonging to each of the participating publishers. The online market reach of Gannett, Hearst, NYT and Trib.’s new online network will be 50 million monthly unique visitors, across 27 US markets. Dana Haye, Interim CEO, quadrantONE, and senior vice president for sales of Tribune Interactive explained the benefit to advertisers by saying “Imagine placing the same ad across hundreds of local Web sites on the same day with one buy-that’s the power of this network.”

quadrantONE is undoubtedly the publishers push at retaining market relevance and combined dominance in the wake of pure play online competitors. If advertisers gravitate to the quadrantONE network and if managed accordingly by the publishers, it just might work.