The Emporer's New Clothers

Oh Yes Baron that looks fantastic on you!!

I read something recently which said the reason the Craig’s List and MySpace’s success was due in part to the fact that they created a culture not a technology. If MySpace had been in Silicon Valley there would have been nothing to talk about but technology versus the sophisticated philosophical musings of the LA scene. Maybe technology is not a good topic for site like MySpace?

So then how is MySpace a good place to have buyers and sellers meet while at the same time controlling this interaction just enough to monetize it. I just went to MySpace and clicked on classifieds and then on jobs and then on the internet engineering sections – they had one job and then they had ads for Monster and Dice running on the same page. This is a very confused model in my opinion. It seems like they care more about their percentage of clicked based revenue they get from hosting ads than they do about their own job space. Well maybe this is because the job is free to list and the “advertiser” and the job itself are not really vetted in anyway. Now maybe this is some kind of new web2.0 way of finding a job but this method has many serious weaknesses. Hence my obsession with how Web2.0 methodologies integrate with Web1.0 flat classified models.

Why not just create a big voluminous social networking site and fill it with Google AdSense code and call it day. Oh I forgot this is the new trend. Oh yes! Buy as many URL’s as you can and put them up with a whole bunch of text that coincides with the most searched terms on Google. Then put Google AdSense on your page and get the revenue from the re-direction. After all, your page was nothing but a load of crap anyway. Maybe Google’s innovation will come back and bite them. Even their highly profitable model seems very Web1.0 to me. In the old days many classified sites made the path to the actual searched item purposely long in order to create page impressions. It seems that this is a requirement for Google to grow as well.

So back to the integration of classifieds and social networking. Let’s go over the possible objectives:

1) I want to take my classified site away from being a site of discrete events and keep people their longer
2) I want to make my site ultra-sticky
3) I want to create more page impressions on which to serve ads so I make additional revenue - ugh
4) I want to cash in the network effect and create traffic with very little cost
5) I want users to classify everything and leave me out of it
6) I want buyers and sellers to meet and I want to make money from the transactions

All of the above are perfectly valid and desirable but many of them are a paradox to the way classifieds work now. If you want to say serve ads on social networking pages of your classifieds site (eg. - none classified product pages) you would need to have an ad service technology which you yourself owned or controlled in order to not compete with your own member’s products. I myself would create contextual ads which would be served against the words which people used to search but classification is a problem. I have seen portals with sponsored content who allowed a competitor’s banner to run above the sponsored content. This is just stupid and sloppy.

Every year Yellowpages sites across the globe spend millions to create cross references and synonyms so that when a person searches they find the product or bit of information for which they searched. If you allow a strange illogical classification system which works for social networking you may be sacrificing the logic of its link to the classified taxonomy. Conversely if you force classified ads into a social networking space then you either alienate your users by removing the “I own this space” feeling or you place ads with very little relevance on the page. Hey if its cost cpm then so be it. I think bad matching reflects very badly on the business. I might be the only jaded person out there but when I see an ad that has supposedly been intelligently matched to me and it is not then I loose a bit of respect and when I see an add that is placed very well then I get the heebies because they only way GMAIL can work is it has been reading my mail.

I often get email from recruiters all the time saying “Here is a job which we think matches you but if it doesn’t then maybe you know someone who it does match?” – Usually these jobs do not match me in anyway. Hence the problem of absolute irrelevance. I think people take for granted how much manual refinement is still par for the course even with glorious Google.

So the above objectives are fine but my tip in this post is the ultimate goal of the integration should be to create more users and translate this increase into more sales and (or) more transactions. The secondary goal should be to know your users better and when nominated by them help them to buy or sell something to someone who wants it faster and more efficiently. It is a great thing to have the network effect working in full force but if you try to sell an omelet to someone trying to buy a chicken you will only end up with egg on your face.