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In Reply to: Re: Time For Something New posted by Ed Sawyer on May 13, 2007 at 18:58:38:
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.....
Follow Ups:
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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