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Gumiyo & Edgeio: Is there a market for mobile classifieds?

Gumiyo lets you post classifieds from your mobile/cell. Edgeio - Michael Arrington’s hyped “edge aggregating” classifieds site started as a blog-listing aggregator, but now appears to be an awkward mix everything-aggregator in the style of Oodle and traditional classified site in the style of Craiglist.

Anyway, a recent press release announced that these two companies are going to be working together. It doesn’t really say how, other than to suggest that Edgeio listings will be browseable on cellphones, and that browsers will be able to contact sellers with text messages or “web-activated telephony” - which I assume is a fancy way of saying “clicking a link to dial a call.”

The question I’d like to ask is: how many people want to search classifieds from their cell phone? What use case does this support? I suppose I could go to a car dealership, find a car that I like, and comparison shop vs. classified listings… that scenario seems to be a reach though. Gumiyo’s tagline is the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless “connecting buyers and sellers” - the question is, what’s the marginal benefit to connecting them in realtime? eBay and Craigslist have done a good business connecting them asynchronously because that supports observed behaviour - i.e.: people generally like to shop & research from home where all of their resources are at their fingertips, and then go and transact. I don’t imagine Gumiyo/Edgeio’s mobile browsing will enjoy the same level of success.

Gumiyo’s cellular posting, however, is a different story. Posting stuff on ebay or wherever is a PITA - out comes the digicam, take some pictures, dump them to my PC, crop and resize, upload to whatever classifieds site I’m using, etc. Gumiyo - see below - makes this a one step, all mobile process that looks to save a tonne of work (for posting simple items, anyway).

IMHO, Gumiyo would be doing the world a favour if they built hooks into eBay to allow Gumiyo posting to an auction - fast, streamlined, and easy.

classifieds, craigslist, ebay, edgeio, gumiyo sales

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ThemBid.com - “Make them bid” on your requests

ThemBid is a fresh new entrant to the the same space as DoMyStuff.com - allowing you to post requests and have relevant service providers bid on your business.

Requests receive bids, and questions, negotiations, etc. can take place in comments. Here’s a good in action example. Businesses and individuals bidding for business on ThemBid.com have profile pages that include maps, reviews, an Apple-esque star-rating, and links to BBB (Better Business Bureau) search-result pages.

ThemBid also crosses into classifieds, offering a simple way to post things that may not fit into the service marketplace.

First Impressions & Suggestions

ThemBid does a good job of covering off high level functionality, but falls short on detail and usability. Given the new-ness of the site, it doesn’t come as a surprise, and I’d expect it to improve over time. For the moment though, compared to DoMyStuff, ThemBid comes across as more of an after hours effort…

More Structured Data Please: Requests have relatively little structured data associated with them, making the process more complicated than it needs to be (i.e.: for “babysitter needed,” days and hours required should be a structured field). Structured data should ideally be category specific.

Category and Location Browsing: Requests are posted to categories & locations - but browsing by either as a criteria is an awkward process - you can’t tell how many requests or classifieds are in each category or location, making browsing a time consuming, hit-or-miss proposition.

Search: Hmm. There doesn’t appear to be a text/keyword means of searching the site at all. That would be a good thing to include.

Design: A know that design and appearance is fundamentally subjective, and lord only knows, Craigslist is a 100% design-free blockbuster - but I find the appearance of ThemBid to be a little tough on the eyes. Greys & reds just don’t seem to contrast well online, and overall the design - to my eye at least looks dated. Given some of the slick functionality that the sight offers, a more eye-grabbing contemporary design would go a long way to converting visitors into members and speaking to ThemBid’s credibility.

Functional Clarity: Classifieds, Requests, and Companies need to be conceptually separated more clearly. There’s stuff in classifieds that could be a Request, and vice versa. My suggestion would be to drop classifieds entirely and focus on the more unique aspect of the site (requests/bids) better.

Summary

ThemBid is a new entrant to a sparsely populated space that I call “reverse classifieds.” Given the headaches of launching anything new in the Classifieds space (craigslist & ebay are their own barriers to entry), “reversing” the equation provides a unique and attention grabbing angle. ThemBid is new and shows it around the edges, but has early mover advantage. If they can keep iterating the site on a rapid basis, ThemBid could get some traction.

Of course, there’s little in the way of barriers to entry protecting ThemBid, so speed of execution is key. Also, providing a viral angle - for example a “Bid on My Request” widget to embed on blogs or MySpace pages, or Facebook platform integration - would capitalize on their early mover position.

If you want to follow their progress, keep an eye on the ThemBid.com blog.

classifieds, craigslist, domystuff thembid

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Craig to Newspaper Association of America: “You’re Screwed”

Found this on FARK and wanted to share in light of my earlier, ongoing quantitative analysis of Craigslist’s explosive growth: I agree with Craigs assessment that the “printing press industry” is screwed, presented to the newspaper industry high-ups at this year’s Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention. Craig notes, however, that there’s plenty of money to be made in quality journalism & investigative reporting.

When you’ve got growth like this over a month…

…you’re allowed to prognosticate.

“We have no advertisers to keep happy and no investors to keep happy. That’s a great relief,” Newmark said to about 250 newspaper executives from around the country, who probably wish they could say the same.

EDIT: From TechMeme - the newspaper association of america has positive news about online readership growth, citing figures showing that online newspaper traffic is growing at twice the rate of the wider internet.

classifieds, craigslist, news newspapers

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THE CRAIGSLIST REPORT: April, 2007 - Massive Growth

Craigslist is a juggernaut. I used to doubt its power, but that is no longer the case. For the last month, I’ve been been tracking listing volumes on Craigslist, city by city, so see if activity is growing, and to what degree - I can tell you now, its growing, and massively. Here’s the main Craigslist Tracker Index Page that gives you access to all of the charts and data.

Top 10 Urban Centers by Growth in Listing Volume:

1. blacksburg (Virginia: charts data) 64.37
2. boulder (Colorado: charts data) 57.01
3. elmira-corning (New York: charts data) 46.25
4. bologna (Italy: charts data) 40
5. iowa city (Iowa: charts data) 39.79
6. sheffield (United Kingdom: charts data) 38.2
7. tippecanoe (Indiana: charts data) 37.87
8. st cloud (Minnesota: charts data) 36.66
9. wenatchee (Washington: charts data) 36.25
10. fargo / moorhead (Minnesota: charts data) 36.1

Top 10 Losers in terms of Decline in Listing Volume

1. hong kong (China: charts data) -5.43
2. kolkata (calcutta) (India: charts data) -7.94
3. birmingham (United Kingdom: charts data) -8
4. christchurch (New Zealand: charts data) -8.04
5. mumbai (India: charts data) -8.85
6. glasgow (United Kingdom: charts data) -9.25
7. durban (South Africa: charts data) -11.02
8. bristol (United Kingdom: charts data) -15.06
9. cardiff / wales (United Kingdom: charts data) -16.12
10. guangzhou (China: charts data) -16.67

I’m tight on time today (this week), so I’m not doing an exhaustive analysis. I will draw a few high level conclusions though: growth seems to be concentrated in the US, in non-core markets: i.e.: CL is expanding in the US outside of its traditional holdouts (Bay Area, NYC, etc.). International growth is a little choppier. Note that the 10 Losers are all international. This pattern is consistent - international growth is slower.

Why might this be the case? I’d hazard a guess that localized, homegrown solutions dominate in places like China or India, while Craigslist utilizaion in these areas would be dominated by expats. That’s a very quick conjecture.

General implications: CL has most of the US locked down. Newspapers should continue to fear it. Classifieds startups should look hard at their prospects and sources of differentiation. Craigslist has only MySpace and Facebook classifieds to fear; As MySpace and Facebook ready to move into CL’s territory, I wonder if CL will add a social networking component to move into theirs?

Notes on Data and Analysis Methodology:

1. Percentage growth rates are not weighted by listing volume. So, going from 100 listings to 200 in a small town would be a 100% growth rate, even though its small in absolute numbers. So - read the numbers carefully and consider them in context until I have time to do a better analysis.
2. The period of data collection is April 3, 2007, to May 3rd, 2007. Measurement takes place in the wee hours of the AM, by a very respectful automated scraper.
3. The full dataset is available here. I’ll make it downloadable someday when I have time.
4. Some cities are duplicated if they are listed in more than one state. The numbers should match for each instance.
5. All of the charts are created with PHP/SWF Charts - which is awesome. I’m using the free version.
6. If you see a chart with “Region A / Region B” - that’s the chart tool’s default state when it encountered an error in data. I need to do some cleanup and these should go away.
7. The odd city dropped off: Denver, for instance, I only have a week or two of data for. I haven’t had a chance to see what’s happened.
8. The growth rates are a lousy metric: its the listing count on April 3rd, divided into the listing count on May 2nd. That gives you a monthly growth rate, with n=1 (i.e.: april) for each city). It doesn’t do any smoothing or anything within the month’s data, so the numbers are pretty grain-of-salt and intended to give a rough impression of what’s going on in each city, supported by the applicable chart.
9. This analysis in no way takes into account listing quality - only volume. All of the gains could be spam for all I know.

That’s it for the moment - enjoy. Comments on analysis, methodology, etc. are welcome.

classifieds, craigslist, craigslistreport, ebay, growth web

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Craigslist’s Billion Dollar Question

Craigslist is lauded by users, and feared by newspapers, job boards, and the classified industry. I’d like to join in the adulation too, and would if Craigslist/Winnipeg wasn’t a ghost town.

So, from way outside the Bay Area, the big question that I’m asking is:

Can Craigslist grow outside of its core markets without changing its business model?

Craigslist may be well-entrenched in its strongholds, but to live up to the fears of the print industry, the hopes of the Craigslist fanbase, and Craig’s own philanthropical goals, it will need to find success outside of a few urban oases.

Fortunately, I have a way to answer this question: the Craigslist Tracker. Every night, I’m going to add the number of listings from cities for which Craigslist had a dedicated subsite on April 3rd. Over time, I’m going to aggregate and chart that data to see where Craigslist is growing, where its stagnating, and where its shrinking - and then mash it up with other data (population), and start drawing conclusions. In the meantime, you can follow the excitement in Times New Roman glory.

Now - please take note: this is not a Craigslist attack or slam. This is (I hope) a valid perspective from someone for whom the 1000-pound Craigslist gorrilla hasn’t materialized and revolutionized my life; I’m wondering if its going to, or if its going to be someone else, or if I’ll be squinting through newspaper classifieds for the rest of my life. Given the abyssmal quality of online classifieds around here (arrrrghhhhh) (gaaack) I’m sincerely hoping Craigslist takes root. I think the results of this study may be of interest to the print industy and other classifieds sites as well.

The other note I’ll make is the arbitrary “billion” dollar question. Billions are, of course, unimportant to a company that eschews the profit motive. A less catchy title might be “Craigslist: Will it become the dominant venue for commerce outside of its present, core markets?”

That’s it. Follow along, and stay tuned for updates.

EDIT: I also wanted to add that while I find Alexa stats inherently sketchy, I found this 3 year graph of Craigslist interesting. I assume that the downward slant is the same overseas weighting issue that’s similarly aggravated other North American focused sites, but it was interesting nonetheless.

business, classifieds, craigslist techfold

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