Category Archives: Online Classified Ads
RIP Backfence.com
Sorry to see that Backfence just shut down operations. From the Local Onliner…
BackFence announced June 29 that it shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the DC area, Illinois and northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million, but never had high penetration in its communities, or sold enough Yellow Pages listings or banner ads to be optimistic about its future…
Craigslist Success
It was a pleasure meeting Craig Newmark last month at the Personal Democracy Forum. Mark Evans shares the following about Craigslist…
Curious about Craigslist’s success? Then check out this podcast that founder Craig Newmark did with David Weinberger. Quote of the podcast from Newmark: “Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.” At the mesh conference last week, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster dropped a few mind-blowing facts:
1. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers
2. All 24 employees work at a Victorian house in San Francisco
3. The company has never had a tech quit in 12 years
4. Craigslist never holds meetings.
Online Ad Revenue Grows 35% in 2006
According to a new report, online ad revenue climbed to about $17B in 2006, a 35% gain over 2005.
Branded display ads and search placements helped the online ad industry post its best year ever in 2006, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Overall, revenue increased 35% last year to $16.9 billion–due in large part to record fourth-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion.
Both search revenue and display revenue climbed 31% year-over-year, to $6.8 billion and $5.4 billion, respectively. Search accounted for 40% of last year’s revenues, slightly lower than the 41% it commanded in 2005. Display advertising, classifieds and referrals accounted for 32%, 18% and 8% of last year’s full revenues, respectively.
See more details here.
Front Porch Forum is just getting its sponsorship program rolling, and we’re going with a flat rate per ad approach. This report states that 48% of online ads work that way, while 47% of the ad deals are based on ad performance.
Sex and Romance Drives Craigslist
I’m often asked if Front Porch Forum isn’t an awful lot like craigslist Burlington. Besides the obvious Grand Canyon of a difference in scale and success (all hail craigslist!), I usually answer “no.” While it’s true that both are an online place to sell your used car among other things, they diverge from there.
And now we see some interesting analysis of how craigslist is used, or at least what drives most of its traffic… anonymous sex and romance postings. None of that on Front Porch Forum (how many readers just nixed FPF with that statement? 😉 ).
Stephen Bagg at Compete supplies the chart below:
He adds:
Compete reports just under 17 million people visiting per month… Analysis of eight major American cities shows erotic services consistently garners the highest number of individual visitors for February – almost always twice as many as the next ranking category, averaging 265,000 people per city. Equally racy lists that consistently score high visitor volume are the section for casual encounters as well as personals for women seeking men. The most commonly frequented venue outside of this virtual red-light district? Cars for sale.
Local news, business supplies for sale, real estate and web design are probably better off advertising somewhere else since they contribute less than a whisper to the overall site traffic.
Avoiding the social issues and political debates that fall beyond this brief glimpse behind the Craigslist curtain, perhaps it isn’t shocking that the search for romance is extremely popular in the online space. Offering anonymity, privacy, and little room for embarrassment, Craigslist is an ideal marketplace for those looking for those willing.
So, Front Porch Forum is in some significant sense the opposite of craigslist… no anonymity, out in the open within the neighborhood. Thanks to MediaVidea for highlighting the original information.
House finds Buyers through Forum
People report remarkable and routine successes from their Front Porch Forum postings. I find the one just received below to be amazing considering how much the real estate market has slowed locally (e.g., the lovely home next door to ours has been on the market for about a year).
I sent a brief email to our Forum to let folks know our house was for sale. Within a few days, I had 9 responses, 4 people who came to look at it, and 2 people ready to make an offer. What a great way to target folks with an interest in our neighborhood. And what a relief to have the daunting marketing of our home made so easy. Thanks! -C.H., ONE Central Neighborhood Forum
Yahoo’s take on Local Online
Peter Krasilovsky reports today about Yahoo Exec VP Hilary Schneider’s keynote at the Kelsey Local ’07 conference this week. Schneider…
emphasized that the company is really zeroing in on local to play a major role in Yahoo’s growth plans. Local search’s share of overall search within Yahoo went from 11 percent to 14 percent in 2006, and local search itself grew 28 percent in the last four months, per ComScore.
Yahoo divides local as:
- Maps – 32M unique visitors
- News and info – 30M
- Social media – 20M
- Classifieds – 20M
- Directory – 18M
Further:
Yahoo Local itself is pretty well built out, with 6,000 city pages and 80,000 zip codes. But it only has 600 neighborhoods. “There are obviously many more than that,” says Schneider. “ We have a long way to go.”
Yahoo looks at the local market as:
- National local – 17,000 businesses spending $22.4 billion in ad dollars
- Regional local – 85,000 businesses spending $48.3 billion
- Local local – 22,000,000 businesses spending $33.6 billion
Big Local Online Event… any Locals onhand?
Looks like a great event shaping up next week… all about local online: DRILLING DOWN ON LOCAL ’07 – The Annual Silicon Valley Summit. Organizer Peter Krasilovsky blogs about it here. Most of the mainstream heavy hitters appear to be on the agenda. I wonder how many locally based entities will attend and/or speak vs. national and global efforts that deliver “local” from afar?
Put another way, how much “local online” is delivered by local business (and other entities)? Might be an interesting question for the good folks at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and my friend and author Michael Shuman (Going Local, The Small-Mart Revolution).
Regardless, I wish I could be there next week… sounds like a powerful conference.
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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