March 17, 2008

Craigslist Ruling: Does This Extend To Our Paid Ads?

A recent ruling in Craigslist's favor may let our paid ad suppliers rest a bit easier, as they are all advertising conduits. Google already states that it's not liable for ads it serves, and this ruling provides ancillary support.

On Friday, a long-standing case against Craigslist came to a close when the U.S. Appellate Court ruled they aren't liable for discrimination as an advertising conduit. Two years ago, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a suit which accused Craigslist of posting discriminatory ads under the Fair Housing Act.

According to the ruling, “Doubtless Craigslist plays a causal role in the sense that no one could post a discriminatory ad if Craigslist did not offer a forum. That is not, however, a useful definition of cause….it cannot sue the messenger just because the message reveals a third party's plan to engage in unlawful discrimination.”

If some ad seems objectionable, we can flag it and Craigslist will respond and remove the ad. They cannot, however, be held responsible for the classifieds themselves and are not equipped to review all ads before they are posted.

Perhaps Google and Yahoo attorneys are pleased with this ruling, too. As ad networks, they cannot be expected to review all ads through their systems either. They do have some complaint systems in place, especially for trademarks. There's no external flagging system for ads which have been purchased through them.

One level removed, publishers who use ad feeds should look at their fine print. Google and Yahoo say they are not liable for the ads they show. In turn, this means publishers are not liable either. Try telling that to a complaining visitor who doesn't like a particular ad that shows up on your site? Well, that's for another day.

Posted by at 10:16 AM | Permalink

November 20, 2007

Oodle 2.0: Improved Classifieds Search

With a new release it's dubbed "Oodle 2.0," the classifieds search engine has greatly improved its search functionality and user experience. To improve its search experience, Oodle has redesigned and better integrated features it had before, as well as added new features and improved search on the back end. All results also offer additional data to place the results in context, such as how often new results are expected to appear, or what the average price for similar items in the area have been in the past. In today's SearchDay, "Oodle Upgrades Search Features," we take a look at some of these features.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:53 PM | Permalink

February 22, 2007

Local Search Partnerships of the Day

Today saw a few notable partnership announcements in the local search space. More specifically in local online classifieds and in mobile local search.

-- First, Tellme announced this morning that it will expand its mobile voice platform to allow mobile search application developers to build products that integrate voice and visual search. Voice recognition technology developers TuVox and Viecore were also named as partners that will work on such applications.

This has the potential to bring together the ease of speaking, and of seeing results on a screen. One of the challenges in mobile search is designing compelling products, given hardware restrictions such as small keypads. So the ability to speak search queries or business lookups can be a way to sidestep this challenge and raise adoption levels.

Conversely, when results are returned, sometimes its easier to see them on a mobile screen than it is to hear them - particularly if the information can be saved on the device (rather than written down) and in turn used to dial a business or interact in other interesting ways such as getting directions or coupons.

40 million people use Tellme every month, including its voice portal and free (downloadable) beta product Tellme by Mobile. These are based on the VoiceXML 2.0 protocol that makes internet data available on mobile devices via voice applications. New "multimodal" capabilities should expand the company's overall user base, by opening the door for new partnerships to be formed and functionality to be built.

This should be a step towards bringing the company's voice search capabilities together with other mobile applications, as the enigmatic mobile local search area continues to see experimentation with new and interesting ways to appeal to consumers and build ad models.

-- Second, fresh off its partnership with Nokia last week, AdStar has partnered with classifieds aggregator Edgeio.

Edgieo will use AdStar's software to offer print advertising upsells (on behalf of newspapers) to its new classifieds listings boards marketplace, a free listings source. Basically, this becomes a channel for for newspapers to upsell print ads to anyone going to Edgio to post free listings.

As many newspaper continue to look for ways to monetize online classifieds, creating free classifieds destinations with print upsell possibilities is one way to go about it. AdStar has created another creative way that positions itself as a value-added channel for its newspaper clients to reach a larger audience of classifieds sellers. This strengthens AdStar's value proposition and its profile as a distribution source for print, online and (as of last week) mobile ads.

For Edgeio, this is an added service it can use to attract additional traffic and listings, as content aggregation is a cornerstone of its business. It gets its content from a combination of listings that people publish directly to its site; and aggregated listings scraped (by permission) from bloggers, individuals and website developers that have listings on their own sites. It currently has about 100 million listings from 162 countries.

Financial terms weren't disclosed but the AdStar integration is scheduled to be completed in the second quarter. More from the press release.

Posted by Mike Boland at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 16, 2006

Craigslist: Not Your Average Business Model

Seems most financial analysts have a hard time understanding Craigslist's business model.

The concept of free just does not sit well with them, according to a report at Information Week.

Not trying to maximize profits is unbusiness like, the analysts claim.

The 47th most visited site online, Craigslist jumps to 9th for number of pageviews. Not surprising. I use it. You use it. And we all enjoy the business model. So Craig don't change. You are like that friend that always has the answers... need anything - Craigslist is my first stop and from the numbers obviously it is the first stop of many people.

Keep up the good work!

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:28 PM | Permalink

November 14, 2006

New Demographic Heatmaps From HotPads

HotPads is a map-based rental housing search site. The site has launched new heatmaps that contain interesting demographic information showing such data as age, income, percentage of renters and average rent. For example, here's per capita income in Mahattan. I have some thoughts on what this means for ad targeting on my blog.

The site previously created mashups for the November U.S. elections.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:21 AM | Permalink

October 5, 2006

LiveDeal Partnership Moves: Vast, SimplyHired

Within the past two days LiveDeal has announced two significant relationships: one with jobs metasearch engine SimplyHired and another, today, with general classifieds aggregator/search engine Vast.

Both sites will be providing all their content to LiveDeal, which will integrate it into the LiveDeal look and feel. LiveDeal is one of the fastest growing online classifieds sites according to comScore, showing 104% year-over-year traffic growth.

Craigslist is the undisputed king of online classifieds, with 13 million monthly uniques across its network. But, eventually, sites such as LiveDeal and Oodle, with more comprehensive information and greater usability, might start to challenge the venerable community site.

There's some additional information on the deals, LiveDeal and the classifieds marketplace on my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 6:58 PM | Permalink

October 3, 2006

vFlyer Seeks To Overcome Classifieds Fragmentation For Sellers

From a marketer's point of view, one of the undesirable characteristics of the Internet in general and the local Internet in particular is audience fragmentation. Like other segments in local, classifieds are growing -- dramatically according to comScore (99% year over year). The firm also shows 37.4 million users in July to 10 high-traffic "classifieds" sites. But, in reality, there are many millions more users going to sites not part of comScore's segmentation that fall within the top three traditional newspaper "classifieds" categories -- Jobs, Cars, Real Estate.

Craigslist has become the 800-pound gorilla in online classifieds. But there are many more sites out there that are meaningful in terms of traffic and value delivered to sellers. Reaching this disaggregated market can be time consuming and challenging.

A new site and service from a company called vFlyer seeks to provide tools and distribution to create better-looking ads, using pre-designed but customizable templates and one-click distribution to a broad range of sites (including Craigslist) -- all free to sellers.

Each templated ad has a unique URL and is being optimized for SEO. So, effectively, these are microsites or landing pages for search distribution too. The business model isn't fully baked, but largely based on advertising although premium services may be offered. Postlets is a competitor.

Here's more on the company from the NY Times.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 2:40 PM | Permalink

September 26, 2006

The Internet, 'Family 2.0' And The 43-Hour Day

Yahoo and OMD issued the findings from the latest round of their ongoing global research project in 16 countries that involves online surveys and in-person interviews. What they found is that through technology and multitasking families are cramming the equivalent of 43 hours of activity into a 24 hour day. They also found that the Internet (and mobile phones) are a significant part of the fabric of daily family life.

There's a lot of interesting material in the findings. The top level data can be found in this release.

The following data are some of the more interesting findings published (some of this is verbatim from the release). Families spend more time online than watching TV:

Using the Internet 3.6 hours
Watching TV 2.5 hours
Using instant messenger 1 hour
Emailing 1.2 hours
Listening to radio 1.3 hours

Other results:

More than half (55 percent) of survey respondents age 18-34 agreed that without technology they "wouldn't be able to stay in touch with friends and family." More than a third in the 18-34 age group said their social lives would suffer without technology (34 percent) and that technology enabled them to overcome shyness (36 percent).

Two thirds (66 percent) of U.S. families surveyed use the Internet to research products, and 64 percent use a search engine every day. Families also use the Internet to share photos (62 percent), make travel reservations (60 percent) and research health (61 percent).

Internet now a primary resource for various categories of information, including some in local:

Families have adapted to new and changing media and technology, and now rely on the Internet as their top source of information on travel, jobs, finance and automobiles. Approximately half of respondents said they rely primarily on television for news (50 percent) and comedy (43 percent). Magazines are a significant source for celebrity gossip and other niche content. Newspapers are viewed as a strong secondary source, after the Internet, for information with a local flavor such as jobs, sports, concerts and events. And regarding advertising and media consumption...

Receptivity to advertising falls as ad channels become more personal. In the U.S., respondents reported that they were most open to ads in magazines and newspapers (72 percent), radio (60 percent) or TV (59 percent), and less receptive to ads on mobile phones or MP3 players.

Curiously there was nothing in the release about ads online or in search.

Postscript: Since viewing the report itself, I have a couple of things to add of interest:

Across the 11 categories of content that Yahoo-OMD explored (News, Travel, Jobs, Music, Movies, Finance, etc.) the Internet was the preferred source in all but two categories (News, Comedy/Humor), where TV was preferred with the Internet second.

Survey respondents in the U.S. were more open to ads ("It's okay to find advertising in each place") in traditional media than online or in mobile. The mobile finding is broadly consistent with other research in the market, but other studies have indicated people are open to paid-search ads and other forms of online advertising if it is perceived to be "relevant."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:44 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2006

Real Estate Search Engine Trulia Adds New Depth, Features

As the housing market cools, the real estate vertical is heating up. Today, real estate search engine Trulia launched several new features, a week after Zillow introduced new functionality and about three weeks after Yahoo! Real Estate announced a range of new tools and a site redesign.

Trulia has now expanded and is offering nationwide coverage through a mix of crawling and listing feeds. It's also providing a range of new information on real estate price trends, comparable homes and neighborhood guides (i.e., schools, commutes and crime data). Here's are example guides for Chicago, Illinois and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Perhaps the most fun new feature/tool on the site are heat maps, which show prices per square foot by area. Here's Chicago and San Diego, California. Zillow introduced something similar last week (Here's an example for Boston, Massachusetts.) The Trulia heat maps are interactive, however, and can be used as a way to locate homes for sale. Buyers can visually identify an area with a price per square foot they can afford and then go directly from the map to listings or an area guide to learn more.

Trulia is ad supported and is showing branded listings within relevant search results. Here's an example for a neighborhood in Miami, Florida. The ads at the top will be relevant to whatever criteria the user has indicated. There's also branded advertising on the adjacent maps. Trulia also has RSS feeds and alerts so users can stay abreast of properties within their criteria without having to visit the site every day.

Trulia is just a year old and has put together one of the most feature rich, useful and user-friendly of the real estate sites on the market. It is not as heavily trafficked as some but from a usability standpoint can go head to head with any site out there.

Real estate as a vertical is a perfect kind of a laboratory for local search. It offers an obvious and valuable implementation of maps, lots of monetization opportunities and ready would-be advertisers who are aggressive and generally ahead of the small business curve when it comes to creativity and online marketing.

Because there's so much money in the sector -- the National Association of Realtors estimates that approximately $12 billion dollars is spent annually in the U.S. on real estate marketing and advertising -- there's lots of competition and innovation.

Now with a slowing market it will get even more intense.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:24 PM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

Classifieds A Big Gainer In Local Landscape

comScore is reporting that the classifieds category is gaining very fast with 47% annual traffic growth. Classifieds sites, as defined by comScore, collectively racked up 37.4 million monthly uniques in July. That's 22% penetration of the total U.S. online population. As one might predict the category leader is Craigslist, which had 13.8 million users and experienced 99% growth vs. the previous year. Only two sites grew faster than Craigslist on a percentage basis: LiveDeal (104%) and Oodle (463%).

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:38 AM | Permalink

July 14, 2006

Newspapers To Team Up With Yahoo To Create An Online Classifieds Network

Reuters reports on a Business Week article that shows how a "loose consortium of newspaper publishers" are in discussions with Yahoo's HotJobs to build an online classifieds network. For Yahoo, this can help increase the popularity of HotJobs and for the newspapers, it can help them drive more ad dollars, but this time, online ad dollars.

Quote from the Business Week article that shows the importance on the newspaper side;

Newspaper companies would build a network within what is one of the Web's top destinations and win a crucial concession in today's search-engine economy: getting a cut of the ads sold around search results of their content. It's a sore spot for publishers that this doesn't happen now.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

Craigslist Adds Cities, Now 300 Strong

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd) over the weekend and a Monday posting on PaidContent, iconic local community and classifieds site Craigslist has added 72 new U.S. markets and more than 20 internationally. The site is now in 300 cities in the US and abroad and has 10 million uniques a month. Revenues for 2005 were estimated to be as high as $25 million. The Journal article is mystified as to why CL leaves "money on the table." But that's part of the homespun appeal of this now powerhouse local Internet brand.

This ClickZ posting speculates on whether Craigslist might eventually give a cut of ad revenues to users. The site reportedly has only 21 employees.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:57 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2006

Topix Adds Free Local Classifieds

Joining the free classifieds fray, news aggregator Topix.net has added the ability to post listings on the site for housing, jobs, private party items, services, events and "local shops." Here's the ad-entry interface and here's an example of where and how the ads appear.

This program has been going on quietly for a few months but is now gaining notice.

Marketing VP Chris Tolles told ClickZ that while the ads are merely geotargeted today they will potentially be vertically targeted as well going forward. The article also says that Topix is adding roughly 300 listings per day, which relatively good given that there isn't much visibility or promotion on the site for the offering.

Topix has other ad units that appear on local news pages. On this page the top and bottom content are contextually and locally targeted ad units. Regarding classifieds, Topix will likely be able to charge for featured listings at some future point when classifieds reach some level of "critical mass." The site may also create a "marketplace" or entry point where users can enter and search or browse classifieds directly by location.

The real news here is why aren't Topix's newspaper owners (Gannett, Tribune and, now McClatchy) doing more to leverage the distribution and community content (8,000 posts a day) that the site has built up?

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:35 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2006

Classified Search Special Interest Group Discussion

The San Francisco area search special interest group is sponsoring a panel discussion called "Classified Search: All Your Ads Belong To Us," on Wednesday, February 8th at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Speakers include Bindu Reddy, Product Manager GoogleBase, Google, Craig Donato, Founder/CEO, Oodle and Keith Teare, Founder/CEO, Edgeio. The panel will be moderated by Greg Sterling, Managing Editor, The Kelsey Group. The event is expected to sell out, so register early if you want to go. More information is available here.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:12 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

Craigslist Not Blocking Major Crawlers

Craigslist Delists Millions of Pages from Search Engine Indexes over at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums gives the impression that Craigslist has embarked upon a new policy of blocking search engine spiders, but talking with Craigslist along with some further poking at the situation shows that's not the case. A summary of the situation below, and if you're a Search Engine Watch member, be sure to read the more detailed longer version of this post.

Avi Wilensky, who posted at the forums, assumed some new change must be in place when he couldn't find a real estate listing from Craigslist via a Google search that brought it up that listing only a few days before. Checking the Craigslist robots.txt file, he noticed that sections with listings about community, housing, for sale, services, gigs and jobs items seemed to be blocked.

At a quick glance, I could see why someone might assume that entire swaths of listings were being blocked. However, the listings themselves are not contained within these sections.

For example, here's the home page of the "blocked" housing area at Craigslist. The URL takes this form:

http://www.craigslist.org/hhh/

See the part in bold? Anything that begins with /hhh after the domain name is restricted by the Craigslist robots.txt file and not open to crawling by Google, Yahoo or others. So clearly all housing listings wouldn't be accessible! Wrong. That's because the listings within the housing section actually don't begin with the path of /hhh.

For example, here are the URLs for the first three listings shown on that housing area home page:

None of them begin with /hhh, as I've shown in bold, so all of them are fully open to being spidered.

Why block those specific table of content pages plus any pages below those particular sections? Craiglist chief executive Jim Buckmaster told me via email:

The URLs in question are sectional header links, which from a crawler standpoint represent a duplicate pathway to our listings, one which I understand from our tech team is disproportionately load-intensive when hit by crawlers.

Am I off the mark and have millions of pages with Craigslist listings now gone? Not from a few checks. At Google, site:craigslist.org shows nearly 12 million pages are indexed from various Craiglist sites, such as sandiego.craigslist.com and charlotte.craigslist.com.

Here are 631 listings for rooms in the North Bay area of San Francisco, for example. Aside from anyone being able to check on this, Buckmaster himself wasn't aware of any reason that content should have gone missing from the major crawlers.

As noted earlier, if you're a Search Engine Watch member, there's a longer version of this post available to you. It goes into more depth of explaining what's in the current robots.txt file, how it has changed plus how while Craigslist does prohibit crawling by classified ad search engines through its terms of use, it still allows general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo to crawl freely.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:55 AM | Permalink

December 19, 2005

Specialty Databases (Verticals) The Focus Of A Wall Street Journal Article

A few weekends ago Wall Street Journal reporter, Kevin Delaney, gave me a call asking for a few ideas, thoughts, and suggestions about useful specialized databases (aka verticals) that would be of interest to WSJ readers.

Today, the article was published and it's titled, "Beyond Google." You'll find it linked here. However, at least for the moment, Kevin's story is only available to WSJ subscribers.

A couple of quick comments and notes:

1) Thanks Kevin for asking for my suggestions and for the quote. You should know that for each database suggested and included in the final article, 40-50 more could have been included and received a well-deserved mention. I had to limit my picks for obvious reasons. Of course, Kevin spoke to others and also included their suggestions.

2) The "Beyond Google" headline is great. The word Google has a way of drawing peoples attention and the title of the headline is often the title of presentations I give. Why? A presentation titled, "Learn about Specialty Databases" does not pack in the crowds. Tossing the word Google into the title, does.

Specialty tools do not replace general purpose large web engines like Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Gigablast, Exalead, and others. A web researcher should have a good working knowledge of both general databases and specialty tools. Plus, in terms of some of my presentations, the word "Google" gets the crowd in the door and then I have time to not only talk about Google (many don't have any idea of what it can offer) but also have time to talk about the great useful stuff being developed by AJ, Yahoo, and elsewhere. So in reality it's a two pronged presensation. As I posted on Friday, it's clear that many people who use these and other tools have little to no idea of how these services work and what they offer.

+ General web engines (The full landscape, how to take full advantage of some of their services, creating better queries). These days it can also include time letting the audience know about verticals that these companies also provide like Yahoo Audio Search.

+ Specialized databases (verticals) the power and often time saving capabilities they offer. The challenge for many is just knowing about them.

3) If you read the blog on a regular basis, you'll likely notice that Kevin used several suggestions that I've written about on our site. Cool!

4) I was especially pleased to see the WSJ article mention the wonderful RegLightGreen bibliographic database and NetLibrary, available for free from many libraries that offers the full text of thousands of books. Remember, as I wrote in this guest column for BetaNews, public, university, and many other types of libraries offer FREE, 24x7x365, access from any web computer (no need to go to the library) to a full range of specialized databases that often offer content not found in web engines (full text journals, newspapers, magazines, reference books, etc.) OR packaged in such a way to add extra value to the data. Plus, these databases tend to offer search capabilities not found from general web engines. Every library offers different service and databases. The easiest to learn what your library offers is to either look at their web site or make a quick call.

Postscript: I'm happy to report that at least for the moment, it's the most popular story on the WSJ site today. Yes, I think the public is beginning to understand the value of specialized tools.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:27 PM | Permalink

December 2, 2005

On Craigslist, Job Loses at Mainstream News Orgamizations, and Citizen Journalism

The San Franscisco Weekly reports in the article Craig$list.com, that the very popular classified ad site, its founder calls it an online marketplace "like a fleamarket," is beginning to cause layoffs at well-known and established news organizations. The story offers all sorts of interesting facts. For example, Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, still uses text-based Pine as his email program. Probably not a bad idea. (-:

Seriously, the article includes plenty of good reading. Here are a few passages from the nine page article.

Newmark now suffers from a moral dilemma: He feels guilty about helping cause job losses and poorer-quality papers, but he's excited to accelerate the decline of the big, bad mainstream media. He seems determined to remedy his sins against the media by changing it for the better, lending his name and dollars to a citizen journalism movement populated by J-school professors, idealistic techno-futurists, and so-called citizen journalists. The hardest-hit publications are in the Bay Area, which accounts for about one-quarter of Craigslist's traffic. The Chronicle and its competitors lose more than $50 million per year because of job ads that have migrated to Craigslist, according to a 2004 report by Bob Cauthorn, the former vice president of digital media at Chronicle Web site SFGate.com, who is now working on his own media venture, City Tools. The San Jose Mercury News alone misses out on $12 million annually in employment ad revenue because of Craigslist, according to recent estimates by Lou Alexander... While the failings of the modern newspaper industry are many, if Craigslist wasn't costing them big bucks, it's unlikely that publishers would have created a host of Craigslist-copycat sites. BackPage, the mostly free classifieds site launched last year by SF Weekly's corporate parent, New Times, is only slightly more commercial than Craigslist, offering additional paid services that place an ad higher in the listings or print it in the paper. While it stopped the bleeding of classifieds from New Times papers, Senior Vice President Scott Spear admits that BackPage has little chance of overtaking Craigslist in its established cities. Nationally, BackPage has 1.8 million visitors per month, less than the number Craigslist attracts in the Bay Area alone. To Craigslist's executives, the consequences for competitors and other industries aren't important. Their choices are justified, they believe, by what the user community asks for. Every month, 10 million people worldwide click through 3 billion pages of Craigslist.

A good read not only on Craigslist but also its founder and ciizen journalism in general. Btw, OurMedia, Wikipedia, and Korea's OhMyNews are also mentioned.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:59 PM | Permalink

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