Thursday, June 12, 2008

Is Craig's List Killing Innovation?

I was having a conversation over e-mail with a friend about the local startup eegloo. I don't know much about the company, so I won't take any liberties to elaborate; you can read their executive summary [PDF link] yourself.

What I do know is that they, and many, many others, are trying to improve the Internet classifieds market that Craig's List currently dominates. Craig's List holds their market share for a lot of good reasons. It's clean, simple, free and most importantly it has massive scale.

I don't have exact quotes, but Craig's List has made it clear that they aren't looking to innovate any further, improve usability or make significant changes to the site. That's not to say they aren't doing things like combating spam and fraud (to a limited extent), but they aren't looking to change the way their website works.

This poses a huge problem for innovation in online classifieds. How can you compete with the massive scale of Craig's List?

Newspapers are certainty failing at it, but we haven't seen them use innovation to try and upset Craig's List's lead. Newspapers are generally relying, wrongly, on their own reach and ability to go to market. In this example users have a choice: go to Craig's List and see a ton of listings, a ton good and a ton that are crap or go to your local paper and see a limited selection and still a ton of crap. At least there are more choices with the former.

So you have startups like eegloo that think they've found a better way. Maybe they have, but challenging the scale of Craig's List isn't even an uphill climb - it's upmountain.

My theory is that there are much better classifieds solutions out there, but Craig's List is killing them. They've basically frozen the market for the foreseeable future and I, just like everyone else it seems, haven't quite figured out how to break them.

I plan on doing it by skipping the destination site and creating highly scalable software that others can use to power their own idea of an innovative marketplace.

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posted by Andrew @ 10:42 AM Permalink 7 Comments

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Marketing to Bloggers

Editor's Note: get comfortable, this is a long one.

You have a product and it's aimed at the average blogger. How do you market it to bloggers? Your widget, your embeddable video player, your content management system; they're all aimed at bloggers. So, how do you reach them? How do you let them know about your product?

It's not easy. I've noticed that we're a fickle bunch. This is a fairly young blog, only about 2 months old, but I've been creating personal websites for about 10 years (they weren't called blogs back then). I've noticed that we tend to gravitate towards a close bunch of friends. And, I suppose that's why this is worth my time and yours.

So, the questions is, how do you market to bloggers? I'm not entirely sure. I'm not a marketing genius, but I what I can do is tell you what I read, where I go and what is important to me in this space. When it comes to my blog, which often includes my professional live, and sometimes my personal life, this is what matters to me. This is where you can reach me:
Notice a pattern? I care about New York. I live / love / breathe / dream / commute / work / love / love New York. If you want to market to me, market to the New York startup community.
Whew! That's a lot. I read those every single day. Most are what you would call work related, but I really love this stuff. If you want to reach me, reach these guys.

  • E-mails / Newsletters:
    • Cynopsis Digital
    • Cynopsis International
    • Cynopsis
    • MediaPost's Section One, Media Daily News
    • MediaPost's Section One, Online Media Daily
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Two, Around the Net in Online Marketing
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Two, Around the Net in Media
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Three, People on the Move
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Three, Accounts on the Move
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Three, Media Classifieds
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Three, Letters to the Editor
    • MediaPost's Online Media Daily, Section Three, Media Events Calendar
    • MediaPost's Just an Online Minute...
    • MediaPost's Online SPIN
    • MediaPost's Video Insider
    • MediaPost's Behavioral Insider
    • Center for Media Research, Research Brief
    • Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog
    • Bulldog Reporter's Winning PR Campaigns
    • Bulldog Reporter's PR Jobmart
    • AdAge Daily News
    • AdAge MediaWorks
    • AdAge Digital
    • TVNEWSDAY
    • The Bowery Presents
    • NY Chapter PRSA, Notice of Upcoming Events
    • Sunbelt Software's WXP News
    • Pacha NYC
    • Creativity Online
    • SPJ PressNotes
    • Adrants Daily
    • Lijit Weekly Stats
    • American Express Rewards Watch
    • eMarketer Daily
    • MediaBistro Daily Media News Feed
    • Apple Newsletter
    • ROO News
Obviously MediaPost sends way too many e-mails and no, I don't read all of these word for word, but I do look at them. The Daily Dog makes the best use of advertising space. If you stopped me on the street I could probably name the companies listed across the top from memory.

I always read Adrants Daily all the way through. The writing is good, the commentary is funny and I look forward to it each day. I also usually read MediaBistro's Daily Media News Feed. It's a great recap of media related news in a nice layout that looks great on my iPhone.

So, the point of all this is two fold. First to give my readers some insight into where I get my news and entertainment, but more importantly, to illustrate that there is no central place to market to bloggers. We are part of a community and that community directly reflects the things we're interested in. If you want to reach us you have to go super-local. You have to take the time to find out where we are and become part of our community.

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posted by Andrew @ 9:57 PM Permalink 1 Comments