RefreshClassifieds

Techcrunch is reporting that Edgio, a start-up focused on syndicating classified listings.  Throughout the summer the company was continually launching new services to syndicate classified listings, most of them without a strong monetization strategy.

No word on the Edgeio.com site about the shutdown or plans to liquidate assets.

Autotrader in Canada has revamped their cover with the help of Lucie Lacava, a well known magazine designer. This is second major overall of the Autotrader magazine design since the Yellow Pages Group purchased the brand in 2006. The cover maintains the Autotrader signature red masthead and continues with the ‘Come meet your match’ tag line that was introduce last year. The new design can be seen here, with the press release here.

While the new cover looks create in the design mock-up its not clear how it will work on the street. Most of the Autotrader magazines generated significant revenue from selling the cover as a premium ad unit and this might the sleek design in competition with revenue. The announcement did not include details on which regions have already deployed the new magazine design or if the design would also apply to the Hebdo line of magazines in Quebec.

Disclosure: I worked for the Yellow Pages Group from Feb 2006 to Jun, 2007.

Ozfreeonline.com has recently announced that they are the largest free classified site in Australia.  No source for this claim was referenced but interesting to see the free classified model moving down under.  The site is well design and its very easy to navigate between the different classified sections.

The announcement also highlights a common problem today with free classified with users facing no shortage of options to advertise with.   We think its only a matter of time before stronger tools become available to allow users to post their classified listings to multiple sites.  Obviously the smaller sites have the most to benefit from this approach but it should provide significant value for users too.

Livedeal ( formerly Yellowpages ) has announced that Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com have consolidated on to a single technology platform.  While this probably means nothing to most consumers since the experience on both Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com is essentially the same.

The big impact with the announcement is probably for business advertisers which should be able to use the tools to advertise on both Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com.  As directories and classified products continue to consolidate it should put Livedeal in a position to save the customer time with a consolidated offering.

Jobrate is a new employment portal that while still in beta, totes its dynamic search as its competitive edge.

Unlike traditional job portals that are driven heavily on static job seeker input to show results, Jobrate shows potential job matches with every key word typed. As the Jobrate site tour explains, typing ‘de in n’ will give you jobs of Designer in New York and Web Designer in New York. The primary search has been set up in this fashion to speed up the job find process.

From an employer’s perspective, Jobrate offers a WYSIWYG style allowing employers to see their ad as they build it and any Webmaster looking to add content to their site will be able to do so via Jobrate’s XML Syndication Technology.

As the site is still its beta stages, employers are able to post jobs for free, but it is unclear how long this will remain a non-fee based listing portal.

In addition to the job search capability above, the site also enables job seekers to search jobs by the most viewed, most demanded and top location, via quick access links.

It is important to note however that the site does not allow for personalization features, such as ‘my account’ where job searches could be saved. Instead, they advertise the ‘email job posting’ functionality as a way for seekers to manage the listings they are interested in, as well as RSS subscriptions to relevant job listings.

Already the site has outlaid a few areas where fees could be initiated once officially launched and although they have added many features to improve the employment search functionality, their lack of personalization features could be their draw back.

Metro France is reporting a new partnership with AnnouncesJaunes.fr to provide housing listings into the Metro print publications.   The housing listings will be featured in a new section with a combination of editorial and classified listings.  The new section will feature 50 classified listings of the over 400,000 listings currently available on AnnoncesJaunes.fr.

This would appear to be a good partnership for both parties with Metro is reporting that 25% of its readers intent to my a new home within the next 2 years.   Both parties bring substantial exposure for the advertisers with AnnoncesJaunes.fr receiving over 600,000 unique daily visitors and Metro Newspaper receiving 2,000,000 daily readers.

Media corp is reporting, through its ChannelNewsAsia, that Mocca.com is now the most popular classified site in Singapore. The site received 7 million page views and 13,000 listings last month. This is a growth of over 700% in the last 2 months and Hitwise is reporting that Mocca.com receives a third of all classified traffic in Singapore. The site has over 40,000 users with 90% of them being active.

The Mocca.com launch was supported with a series of TV commercials, like the ad here.

These tongue-in-cheek ads caught a lot of attention and have been distributed on Youtube.com. Its not clear if these were uploaded by Mocca.com or by fans of the ads. Mocca.com is still offering free ads and no information was disclosed on revenue so its hard to judge the financial success.Mocca.com also has lots of room to grow. Hitwise is reporting that the Singapore classified marketing is 0.2% of total internet traffic while in the US the classified market is 1.1% of total internet traffic. Its great to see Mocca.com attracting so much success but I’m sure this hasn’t gone unnoticed by competitors. It will be interesting to see if Mocca.com can maintain this level of growth.

In the last year we’ve seen a steady increase of both Radio and TV companies developing classified business off of their websites.  The cost of setting up a classified site are so low now that its very practical to setup the site directly, or create a partnership to provide content.   Even if the Classified section runs at a loss it helps drive traffic to other parts of the site which can be monetized with advertising.

The strategy involves the realization that classifieds on their own are a fairly cheap form of content which will attract a lot of users.  Most classified focused companies try to monetize the classified ads directly but Radio and TV companies can use the classified content to attract users and monetize other parts of the site.  Microsoft Live Expo, and Facebook are using essentially the same strategy to attract users to their sites.

With this sort of strategy becoming more popular we expect to see a lot of pricing pressure on classified only websites.  They will need to seriously consider their relationship with Radio and RV companies and how they want to develop the classified market.

IQZone, one the leading provide of classifieds to mobile phones, has partnered with Daily Jolt to provide mobile classified to all of its 200+ university and college focused sites. The IQZone process to ad classified ads looks like a very easy 3 step process:

1. Take a video or photo with your phone
2. Add your text, price and zip
3. Send to ad@iqzone.com

IQZone can expand the text from abbreviations into more meaningful text description, for example A/C can be expanded into ‘Air Conditioning’.

This should be a good partnership for both companies, with students using text messaging on their phones more and more.  The only problem we see is that Daily Jolt is still not very popular the space.  Facebook is much more popular with university and might be a better talk for the IQZone technology.

Jobloft.com latest blog entry about the National  Job Fair & Training Expo, reminded me that online classified sites often forget to use offline channels to increase their brand awareness.   Its great to see Jobloft, a relatively new online start-up, using events and trade shows to grow their business.  Lets look deeper at why these events are generally good value.

The National Job Fair & Training Expo is located at the Metro Toronto Convention Center and should receive approximately 9,000 visitors during the 2 day event.  Lets assume the event costs about $10,000 to attend, with cost for booth space, staff and other expenses.    Lets assume with a reasonable booth position 80% of visitors are exposed to your booth, so the cost for exposure is about $1.40 visitor.   This is just the cost of exposure, and a good event strategy should include interaction tracking either through a contest or some other means to track people entering the booth.

When compared with  search advertising the costs for keyword like “Toronto Jobs” and “Toronto Training”, the cost per click is approximately $1.40 and $2.30 respective in Google Adwords.  This is on a cost per click basis, which basically get the user to your web site but doesn’t ensure they actually interact with it.  Is this equivalent to someone walking by your booth at Tradeshow?  Lets assume its pretty close.

On these numbers alone though, the value of trade shows is not clear and it looks about even value with search advertising.  But consider the industry contacts that are also at this type of trade show.  In the case of the National Job Fair, there are 158 other exhibitors, many of them would probably be interested in Classified Job advertising.  You’re essentially getting free exposure to industry advertisers, which in many cases are the most valuable, for free as part of the event.  When you consider this as part of the equation the value of these events becomes more clear.

Each events needs to be evaluated separately though, if the exposure rate fell below 80% of attendees or cost to attend ballooned above $10,000 then the value of the event should be questioned.