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In Reply to: Audiogon is at it again! posted by Todd R on May 13, 2007 at 10:53:06:
I've had it with this "outfit" as well.I had only considered doing something about it in the past, but this summer for real I am going to look into starting something to offer as an alternative to them. If it looks viable and maintainable I'll start it this fall.
I will also come here and get input what people want. To me, a site like that should be a site like this, a community affair maintained by one of us to cater to our peculiar needs, and not, as you say, a greed machine that keeps taking away more features while charging more and more money.
How's this for a start: Single item ads - $4 Multiple item (dealer ads, you're selling cables etc...) stay up 30 days and cost $6 Categories and searches will be more expanded and intuitive as well.
The basic ad template will be more varied, and if you want to use your own html you are free to do so. Leaving feedback will be required and any user who gets repeated bad feedback will get suspended and removed entirely if it continues. No payoffs to have bad feedback removed either. You screw people, you're gone forever.
I just need a good name for it........ any suggestions?
Follow Ups:
a Gunny Sack
Thanks for playing but I think I'll pass.... :^ )I was hoping to conjure up something besides the image of a moldy, burlap sack. On top of that, the word sack has a negative connotation, ie.. being fired.
How's this instead.
Or Audio Utopia, whichever.Maybe you could arrange for some sort of cross-promotion with AA. Maybe Rod would entertain the idea of the "official" AA classified section existing and being managed under another banner, off-site, with a percentage of sales going to AA. Perhaps a tie-in between AA monikers and your site's monikers could be doable, for those who wanted to. Agon must be using sales data in some regard or else there would be no reason for their questions when leaving feedback. I wouldn't be surprised if they are selling that data to manufacturers, which is an income stream you could duplicate. I'm sure manufacturers can tell you what non-personally identifiable info vis a vis sales they'd like to know. And have a search function that immediately indexes new entries. I've seen items listed in the relevant section at Agon for days before it shows up in a search. Provide some way for new members to be verified, if they choose to, probably through credit card info, to lessen the risk of fraud. Having special promotions from manufacturers, with higher-visibility listings and/or ad placement for those promotions, might be one way to help generate both customer traffic and advertising. And no downtime like Agon when the site decides to stop responding late at night.
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DIY branding/design/identity/logo almost always looks bad. first impressions are a one-shot deal. while kinda kitschy, this identity basically is very amateur looking. Good branding/design is well worth the $. Spend it if you are serious about it.
it's more than just building the site/software. hificlassifieds and classifieds here on AA exist and are free (at least at AA) but still don't have the traffic. the key is funding/advertisement/eyeballs. chicken and egg thing... without one the other is useless but how to jump start it? I'd suggest all ads are free to start. That's the only real way to build traffic. and even then it might take a year or more for it to be a serious venue. There's a lot of other sites to buy/sell at too (AK, Audiocircle, head-fi, et al) most of which are free.good luck.
I was actually considering developing such a site, but I don't have the time or resources, so I might as well pass my ideas on to you since you seem invested in this venture.$6 per ad is fine, although I think $5 or less reaches a wider audience. By my crude calculations of Audiogon's listed items, it appears the best price point is between $4 to $5. Their rate increase from $3 to $6 severely impacted the rate of new (and consequently total) listings. If I was selling physical goods, I'd aim for maximum profit margin at lower volume (risk management, cash flow, et al). But for online services, I'd do the exact opposite. Try to get as many users in the door, and let the user-base snowball.
Ideas to attract people (other then setting up a functional and attractive site): Offer people an initial discount on their first X amount of ads. Or offer a specific trial period. You should also set up a referral system. For example, if you refer a customer, you get 5 free ad credits. This model worked brilliantly for Paypal and other service sites.
As Ed suggests, it's vitally important to develop your membership from the start. Once you hit critical mass, people will naturally find and flock to your site without any effort on your part (and perhaps even despite your shortcomings, as Audiogon's staff clearly demonstrates).
A few simple suggestions about the site layout. Make searches sortable by end date, price, and location. Find a good balance for the number of meta-tags for a listed item without being a burden to the seller listing his/her item. For example, it would be really nice to look for speakers in a specific efficiency range or an amp of a particular design (SET vs. PP vs OTL, etc.). I would, however, leave these fields optional, but encourage members to fill them to optimize their selling potential. Email notifications about a particular search result are also a big plus. Besides, email notifications function as an automatic traffic generator.
Feel free to email me for more input. If you are serious about this venture, I will be happy to assist you to help it succeed.
Len's ideas are all good ones. Except for the price. Seriously, who is going to spend $ to advertise at a site with no traffic? Certainly not me. nor will I bother looking there for anytyhing when there's maybe 10 ads listed. (other sites suffer the same fate, incl. AA's classifieds which are poorly moderated, unfortunately). Free ads... maybe. if it looks worth while. there's piles of free ad classifieds already (craigslist) that have way way more traffic than any startup is going to have. so it has to be a site with promise to even be worth the time/bandwidth to bother with. The way to get people there w/o any real ads is community. E.g. like what we have here. maybe a bit more elaborate/different/etc. But some sort of hook to bring traffic, which will then bring ads. which will then maybe bring revenue. Without serious start-up capitalization in the form of site development, marketing, identity, etc., it's an idea that will likely not get off the ground, unfortunately. The days of easy web success are long past (think 1999), barriers to entry are much greater now.
> > AA's classifieds which are poorly moderated, unfortunatelyWhat do you mean? I check them quite regularly and delete the cell phones spam and such. I've also added some AI to the mailer that will hopefully catch the Nigerian scammers fairly quickly. This won't come on line until next week after we move to the new server.
What other problems do we have other than not enough ads?
-Rod
For the AA ads,people just gotta start using them.Its a great service.
I think a free trial period is a solid approach. The reason I think the referral concept is better (in conjunction with or as a substitute to the trial period approach) is that people will view their earned credits as something with more intrinsic value and treat the site more seriously. Studies have shown that people who pay for content have much more favorable opinions of this content .... even if the content is not exclusive (and can be found for free elsewhere).
One more suggestion off the top of my head that is important to me: Allow people to link to up to two other existing feedbacks, such as ebay's or Audiogon's. Starting from total scratch is a big turn off for most people. The tricky part is how to verify people are honestly linking to their accounts on other sites.
just have them send email/contact through the other accounts for verification. that's fairly valid proof they are your account (within some reason of course. it would be doable to defraud that idea but it's more trouble than it's worth probably).
Free isn't the answer. As you point out, lots of sites offer free ads and they get no traffic.What it boils down to is the President/ Boyfriend conundrum. No matter how bad policitans (or partners) screw you, people still vote for the guy they know is no good good over the unknown who promises change. Why? With the former, at least you know how bad you're getting it, the other guy is unknown, and people fear the unknown.
The answer, and I think the problem with the other things, is they are not slick. They look amateurish or are just text blurbs. Who wants to waste time trying to sell a 4 grand amp that way? If I do it, you can believe the main page is going to SCREAM "this is the promised land". It will look a thousand times better than audiogon as well, and it will be run that way.
Everyone here is sick of the situation. I am too. I'll give it a shot. If nobody supports the attempt then the community deserves the gouging it gets. I'm not interested in even making money from it, so long as I don't loose any. I am simply tired of us not having a viable option.
And the first thing to do is court the dealer/manufacturers. I steal them, A-gon will be long gone.....
slickness isn't what's needed. There's piles of decent looking easy-to-install open source forum and classifieds software out there for decently looking slick sites. Eyecandy is a waste of time. content and traffic are king in this game. Selling a $4k amp with just text? Hell way more expensive stuff than that sells all the time on Craigslist and elsewhere with just text. Too much HTML is a scourge on the eyes. look at any junk dealer/power seller/wanker on ebay, most of them have garish rubbish-infested auction pages that are atrocious and painful to look at.Look at other sites in other realms which do well... photography would be one example. photogon exists but it's a desert wasteland. no one uses it. why not? there are other better sites, which while maybe not as slick as photogoon, are way more interesting and community driven. Fredmiranda.com, Photo.net, apug.org, many others. Some are free and some charge for ads. But they are all getting way more traffic (thus, ads) than photogoon, which has basically no community.
building the site and the back-end database and server structures, and user-interface and whatnot is the easy part. (I do that for a liviing). The traffic/marketing/community buy-in is the hard part.
don't think this is all negative commentary, as the reason I am even bothering to post so much on this topic is I would like to see an alternative to audiogoon be born, grow and succeed. if I didn't, I would'nt waste my time with these replies.
I appreciate your input. I don't want sycophants, I want people to tell me what they want.I get the whole "look" thing. I also despise ebay ads so full of needless crap I leave the ad before the page can even load (and I have a cable modem). Some examples of my finished work are my music review website the Indiepop Spinzone and my recent endeavor Magnestand. Kitschy I can't help, it's who I am. I have found however most people like it, or at least are not bothered by it.
I would intend the search engine to be more useful. It is amazing to me you can't search by zip code even on ebay. (although their old original search engine was much better but they removed it because stupid people couldn't use it).
I'd also like to start a program called gear roulette. Manufacturers (especially of cables etc...) mail you their item for evaluation for a week (for a 5 buck fee). At the end of a week they inform you who to mail it to next, and you ship it to them. They do the same thing, and so on.... The dealer will build up some equity from all the auditions, and it will bring their item to a wider audience. Who wouldn't try a new cable for 5 bucks? And if the dealer finds someone else is selling more, maybe they can change their design to accomodate public tastes before it costs them in the long run. (it would take established feedback of some sort to participate in this program, ebay feedback being fine) I have a lot of other ideas as well.
I agree the hardest part is having people come to a site with no ads and posting one. Maybe I should just post 1,200 fake ones, like starting club membership cards at 1,001. :^ ) (I'm joking, I'm joking)
I think 3 or 4 free months to begin would help a lot. (and bonuses for referrals) Then ads would be $2 for 30 day single item ads (dealer or not, ad removed when sold) $3 for multiple item ads that last 30 days (dealer or not. you simply have more than one of the item, stays up full 30 days) or $5 for a 90 day single item listing. (dealer or not, removed when sold)
We'll see what happens. I'd have to find someone good who could write all the complex scripts and maintain it. I'd probably use my current webserver (jumpline) to host who have been very reliable and my sites are never slow or have down time.
I wish you luck.Honestly, I don't think that technology is the issue. We gone down that path and have never heard anything that makes us believe that if we just had this one thing, we'd replace Agon.
Craigslist is a perfect example of simple and huge traffic.
We have plenty of traffic. We just need more ads. It's a chicken and egg thing.
Marketing to dealers and manufacturers is a good idea, but it's a lot of work. It's something we've done a little of though not consistently.
-Rod
I'd shop there.
I think one other important thing is to have an excellent, easy to use search engine.There is room out there for another good competing site, getting people to use it is the trick.
I think you may succeed.
Amante
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