RefreshClassifieds

Trader Corporation, owner of the Autotrader brand in Canada, has announced an exclusive partnership with the Canadian International Autoshow.  The Canadian International Autoshow is held annually in Toronto and the largest Canadian Automotive show.

Typically attendees of the Autoshow are consumer that are looking for a new automobile.  Attendence for the week long event typically exceeds 300,000 and the show occupies 800,000 squarefeet in the convention center and the skydome.

This looks like a good partnership for both parties as Autotrader seeks to reach customer looking for an automobile and encourage them to consider a used vehicle as part of their search.  The Autoshow typically benefits from increased exposure on the Autotrader publications and Autotrader.ca.

The relationship seems to be focused exclusively on the Toronto show.  There is no mention of the regional shows in other Canadian markets.

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.

According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the average number of unique monthly visitors (UMV’s) to newspaper websites grew by more than 3.6 million in 2007, making it a record year for the industry. The 2007 UMV figure is an increase of more than 6% over 2006 numbers.

Monthly unique visitors to newspaper websites averaged 62.8 million in Q4’ of 2007 and it was the largest quarter reported, since the NAA began tracking online usage in 2004.

Additional findings in the Nielsen Online report created for the NAA state that:

• Heading into the holiday season, newspaper websites experienced a record in October 2007. More than 63.2 million people visited newspaper websites that month, more than any month on record - and an 8% increase from the same period a year ago
• For the year’s fourth quarter, 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper websites, with visits averaging 44 minutes a month
• In the fourth quarter, users generated more than three billion page impressions on average, a 7.3% increase over the same period a year ago

The National Post released its new site design and the results are impressive. They have gone from the smaller text with gnawing prominent yellow, to larger images and lots of them, cleanly placed on the home page. The screen width in this newer sleeker post site has also grown, making the content images aesthetically pleasing. The site still, unfortunately, makes you scroll to infinity to get to the content placed at the bottom of the screen (all newspapers seem to be repeating this mistake). This just means that the Post could utilize links on their home page a little better.

What makes this re-vamp monumental for the National Post is that they have dropped the subscriber barriers. All of their content will be served, for free, online. The post will also look to include blogs for a more personal editorial take on news and current events.

HGTV recently launched a new site called FrontDoor that is built on the concept of real estate services and fueled by property listings.

FrontDoor will be going head to head with Realtor.com and Zillow and Realtor.com, according to HitWise, was the most trafficked real estate site in the US, week ending December 8^th. So, competition will be tough for FrontDoor.

The HGTV real estate site launched with 1.2 million listings – not bad. Those listings however, are the result of current relationships Scribs HGTV has with aggregators of real estate listings and are not the result of organic growth.

FrontDoor is hoping that it will appeal to home seekers through their intuitive home-buying guides that are developed for the individual. They go as far as to create home buying tips for women, tips for those buying real estate with friends, foreclosure counseling and much more. They have tried to outwardly cover the services the other sites have not.

Given the turbulent times the American real estate market is going through, it is risky to launch another properties site, but if FrontDoor can leverage their services as their niche, it just may work.

The New York Post, one of oldest and fastest growing daily Newspaper publishers in the US with 4 Million monthly users, has partnered with Oodle, one of the largest online classified sites.  Oodle.com works by aggregating classified listings from a variety of sources so that users can get access to them on a single site.

It would appear that Oodle will provide a custom built classified site for the general classified listings.  The NYpost.com will continue to maintain separate classified listings for Automotive, Jobs, Real Estate and Dating.

The choice to use Oodle as a provider is an odd for the NYpost.com because Oodle aggregates all classified listings and it may now be possible for competitive classified listings to appear.  All listings in the general classified section will be free but this approach may drive traffic to competitive sites.   Its not clear if the NYpost.com and Oodle will actively filter competitive listings to avoid this problem.

I think it has been said and everyone now gets it that traditional sources of news have got to e-enable themselves in order to stand a chance at competing. Newspapers get that - The issue newspapers are faced with now is what to do once with the site once it has been built? In essence – ‘How do we drive traffic to our site?’ It should first be said that there aren’t too many publishers asking this question, as many of them rely on organic search terms to get by – and of course - focusing organically does not foster growth. However, there are few who understand e-sales and the value of creating a massive marketplace online for the benefits of buyers, sellers and information gatherers.

I performed random searches for things that newspapers generally target as their big verticals. The results confirmed that newspapers have not been doing all that they can to optimize their sites and as a result, are missing the opportunity to expand their marketplace.

• Apartments for Rent in NY – Kijiji appeared five times in the first two pages, but no New York Times.
• Used Cars LA – Kijiji again had dominant listings, but no LA Times or even Auto Trader
• Used Cars Toronto – A newspaper site (Wheels – Toronto Star) appeared on the second page of my search results.

The test could go on and on, but the point is the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality has the potential to cripple even the most web savvy publisher, very quickly.

From what we can see today, search engines are looking at ways to better the search experience through personalization. To a publisher or site owner, this means there should be less reliance on someone Googling your business name as opposed to your products. In order for search results to work for you, you need to start thinking like the customer and include Meta Tags that are relevant in likeness to the terms a customer would use, while performing a search. You should also be thinking about your site architecture and decide on the pages or content you want measured, read and trafficked - You should optimize those pages as well.

If this seems daunting, there are services that can help you. You can reference the service of a search-marketing agency and they will not only consult on SEO (search engine optimization), but also SEM (search engine marketing). If you think you can handle it yourself, use a robust reporting source like Hitwise to keep current on how people in your marketplace are searching for the items or services you offer, as well as see how your competitors are stacking up in regards to search.

The findings from a study performed by Penn State’s Dr. Jim Jansen and Amanda Spink, earlier this year, summarizes it best:

• Half of all users entered only one search query.
• 54 percent viewed just one page of search results per visit to the search engine.
• Searchers typically visit only the top three search results.
• About 55 percent of users checked out one result only.
• Only 19 percent went on to the second page.
• Fewer than 10 percent bothered with the third page of results.
• More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results

Hitwise is reporting that the Nintendo Wii is the leading search for shopping and classified sites, accounting for 0.19% in the category.  Nintendo has been struggling worldwide to maintain inventory of the Wii and many times brand new consoles are being sold a premium on classified sites.  Other popular search items were “apple ipod”, “ipod” and “iphone”.

If your a classified site opperator you can use this information to help drive traffic to your site.  If you have advertising focused on the Wii or the Apple iPod products make they are being found by search engines ( like Google ) and customers can easily find these sections.