Craigslist revamp in the works?
BetaBeat has reported that Craigslist is seeking engineering help with what would seem to be a redesign – and it’s doing so with a Craigslist ad.
Clues as to what the plain-as-can-be classified portal might have in mind are in the job description:
Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers at craigslist.org (financial district)
Date: 2012-05-16, 7:39AM PDT
Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers
* develop new products and features;
* optimize internal team tools for efficiency and effectiveness;
* integrate new front-end technologies wherever appropriate; and
* solve interesting tech issues at billion-page-view-per-day scale.
“it feels like newspaper classifieds.”
Facebook testing classified upsells
The “freemium” business model is now the growing global default for classified ad business models — where the ad is free but the advertiser can pay a small fee for highlighting it, promoting it, extending it or otherwise making it more prominent.
Enter Facebook.
Just a few days before its initial public offering, Facebook is testing a freemium model for classifieds and other “highlighted posts.”
(We learned about it from Mashable.com, which in turn learned about it from the New Zealand blog “Stuff.” We haven’t yet had a chance to get confirmation from Facebook or follow up. We’ll do that next week, but Facebook is in a “quiet period” under securities laws and we don’t know whether they’ll talk at all.)
Facebook told Mashable “highlighted posts” is in a limited test, with prices ranging from nothing to “a couple of bucks. Two examples of potential “highlight” users the company gave were someone selling a car, or a band promoting an appearance. Mashable said highlighted posts could make Facebook a competitor to Craigslist. (Well, isn’t just about everybody?)
The Mashable piece includes a screenshot of one example of a purchase screen.
Monetize, monetize, monetize. We hate the word, but it’s something Facebook had better be doing. Because once it goes public, the pressure for increased revenue will be relentless.
Prostitution ads: Record visits, $3.2 million sold
Traffic to U.S. websites that publish escort and body-rub ads hit a record in March, while five of those sites sold at least $3.2 million in online prostitution ads during the month.
March revenue from online prostitution ads increased 2 percent from the previous month and 8.6 percent from March 2011, according to estimates by the AIM Group, and it was just $60,000 short of the record set in January.
There were 6.1 million unique visits to 22 tracked sites, according to Compete.com. That’s a 6.3 percent increase compared to February and a 23.1 percent increase from March 2011. That’s the highest total since AIM Group began tracking prostitution-advertising statistics in August 2010. For comparison, Craigslist, the world’s largest classified advertising site, had 62 million unique visits in March. Continue reading
Emma the new Craigslist? No — not yet
Prostitution-ad revenue up 9.8 percent from year ago
Online prostitution advertising generated at least $3.1 million in revenue in February on five U.S. websites, an increase of 9.8 percent compared with the same month last year, but a drop of 3.8 percent from a record high in January.
Nearly 80 percent of the revenue was attributed to Backpage.com, which generated at least $2.5 million from the sale of online ads for escorts and body rubs in 23 U.S. cities. February prostitution-ad revenue at Backpage.com increased 36.5 percent compared with February 2011, but was 3.8 percent lower than in January, according to estimates by the AIM Group.
During the last 12 months, prostitution advertising in 23 U.S. cities generated at least $36.6 million, the AIM Group estimates. More than two-thirds of that amount — $26 million — was generated by Backpage.com, a general classifieds site owned by Village Voice Media. Continue reading
Sites set combined record for online prostitution-ad revenue
Five websites that carry prostitution advertisements in the United States set a record with combined revenue of nearly $3.3 million during January. The total was up 1.4 percent from December and 3.3 percent from January 2011.
It’s the highest combined revenue total since Craigslist stopped selling advertising for escorts and other adult services in September 2010.
About 70 percent of the revenue was attributed to Backpage.com, which generated at least $2.6 million from the sale of online ads for prostitution and body rubs in 23 U.S. cities. January’s revenue at Backpage dropped 1.9 percent compared to the previous month, according to estimates by the AIM Group.
However, Backpage’s January revenue was 23.5 percent higher than the $2.1 million estimated in the same month last year. Part of the increase can be attributed to rate increases that took effect near the end of 2011. Continue reading
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