China classified information website lingers in wait for Gordo

The intermediary transaction SEO diagnoses Taobao guest stationmaster buys the Cloud host technology Hall

As China's Yahoo officially launches a new platform for Word-of-mouth life Services, 58 with the city and the first Chinese tourism search engine "where" formal strategic cooperation, "Customer gathered" officially renamed as "Bai", China's classified information industry after several years of silence, seems to usher in the industry development of the outbreak period, Its true face is beginning to appear gradually.

Now still alive classified information site There are two kinds of fate, one is alive, but from the signs of life, just barely struggling, another with the support of capital, still lively. But has been puzzling the classification information website's profit pattern question, nobody has completely solved. The classified information industry in China is still in its initial stage, the classification information website should innovate continuously, the development of the industry is a protracted war and should be operated as a lifelong enterprise.

4.3 million, 4.5 million, 5 million ...

In the hot summer, sitting in the big office on the five floor of the new building, Yiu Jingbo every day to ask the number of registered users of the website.

3 years ago, when he found that the simple enterprise Web services can not fully meet the needs of personal information interaction, he resolutely left the million network into the classified information industry. And the internet, like many emerging industries, with his peers there are another group of people, they take the whole industry's beautiful vision, some penniless, some linked to a well-known group under the name, and some with a small amount of risk funds, followed.

3 years later, some of them are still penniless, and some have left a domain name that is still unknown-but each of them is a pioneer, at least in China, where they have been recorded in the history of the industry.

Yiu Jingbo is undoubtedly fortunate, in the founder of the 3rd year of the 58 with the city network, he won the second money from SoftBank, and then put forward to achieve 10 million before the end of the user scale, next year into the top 20 of China's Web site list. In fact, it's just Craigslist's level in the United States a few years ago.

The dream of Crixus

Almost every practitioner in the classified information industry has used Craigslist as a target, including Yiu Jingbo.

A myth about Craigslist began to enter the eyes of Chinese Internet users in 2005: More than 300 cities, extending from San Francisco to around the world, attract more than 15 million of visitors a month and generate more than 5 billion page views, creating hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions between subscribers.

More importantly, it has the most enviable model of the domestic Internet: very low technical content, high site valuation. The former, gives people the courage to start a business, that everyone can do classification, and the latter, gives people the space to imagine, to become China's Craigslist.

In March 2005, Yang Hao-hu and several partners founded the net officially online, a few days later, Sina's classified information channel and ebay investment customers converged on the line. In July of that year, Yiu Jingbo 58 joined the city network. Since then, the country has more than 200 related websites swarmed.

It's a collective trip for Chinese internet people with hopes and desires.

They set up a large shelf in the shape of Craigslist, setting up a number of city stations and providing multiple service categories. Most of them from a certain city began to do, some do all-inclusive classified information, some only keep the user demand more exuberant rental and friends of the category, and some focus on restaurant reviews.

Unfortunately, for the next 2 years, the wonderful scenes that people eagerly awaited did not appear. April 2007, the Oak group closed its classified information site "Renren", followed by a number of small web sites to opt out, the slow heat of the industry so that some eager to see the results of the investors backed off.

Last July, Google officially announced its joint venture with net Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co., Ltd. "From the first day, I knew it wouldn't be an industry that would soon see a return." NET founder Yang Hao-hu decided to devote billions of dollars to net in the next 35 years, with more patience and money to nurture the market.

Yang Hao, who has the same strategic mentality as the CEO of Wang Jianyue, predicts that this will be a seven or eight-year battle. June 25 this year, the guest site officially renamed "Bai". Wang Jianyue said: "We look forward to a better experience of community users through localized branding, so that our classified information community is more active and larger." "Although he called the" change "as" a further escalation of the localization of China's classified business ", but" knowledgeable "people understand that China's classified information industry is still in its infancy, in the user habits and market environment to be further training," change "does not mean to enter a new state of survival.

Analysis by Webvisible/nielson, a global professional analyst, shows that 86% of Internet users in the United States are looking for local businesses through the web. The US life search industry is growing at a rate of 24% a year, according to comscore, while general search is growing at just 14% per cent. The report by Kelsey, the authoritative investigative agency, found that the global local search market was about $4.1 billion in 2006, with 22.3% The annual compound growth rate is expanding rapidly, and will reach the total market of USD 11.1 billion in 2011. But in China, according to Cnnic's findings, the Internet's help to People's daily lives is still not deep enough.

Obviously, it is not feasible to copy Craigslist completely. So, on this paper, where there is no single answer, everyone has a new calculation.

Community migration

If you describe Craigslist as a word, it is a commercial web site in the name of a non-profit Wikipedia and a for-profit second life.

Founded in San Francisco in 1995, founder Craig Newmark was designed to provide friends with a convenient way to learn about upcoming parties and other interesting events. It is the most popular source of information for finding homes or jobs, buying or selling a variety of items in the San Francisco Bay Area, with fewer than 20 employees operating in the entire global company, working in an old house in a large residential neighbourhood near San Francisco.

Craigslist's power stems from its efficient organization and powerful search for information in the site. At present, Craigslist has 23 staff, from the founder, CEO, customer service consultants, technicians, about half of the people in the technology, half of the people in the customer service. They deal with a huge amount of information, email, and other work every day, but they can cope with the development of Craigslist around the world.

Newmark always said: "I don't understand what your business model is, I just know we tried to make it into a non-profit organization, but we failed." So you can only set up a company and want to make it a profitable website. The scale is not what I thought it was, but later, we do not charge our members because we are a community website. As he said, Craigslist's success is not in the category, but in the community.

Like MySpace, it is a community model formed by the means of "fashion", "Music" and "Non-mainstream", which, like Tianya, is a community model formed by the means of "humanistic emotion". Here, "Classification", "Fashion" and "human feelings" are the same tool concept.

Our country's classified information website entrepreneur is realizing this gradually. "Do the content while doing the community." Yiu Jingbo said that with the advent of the community, people's lives are tense and time is limited, and the attention to classified information will be greatly increased. If the site can provide a primary community classification information, timely information updates, then it will attract a large number of community users, rapid expansion of web site browsing, thereby enhancing the site's brand impact in the community.

According to Yiu Jingbo's plan, he will add a "you have never experienced" community section in the new website launched this July. He believes that when the information is greatly enriched, as the user's reliance on the site is increasing, the site will naturally transform to the community, "not in the form is the forum or classified information, as long as the user recognition, users gathered, can become a community." ”

But analysts say Internet "classification" business has a high "Matthew effect", that is to say, if you want to "classify" into the community, must make their own site to break the Avalanche point quickly (Tipping points), become the industry's first, so as to enter a positive feedback of the development model;

Craigslist's advantage or luck is that it has been "categorized" into the community since more than 10 years ago, and when some Internet predators have not yet reacted, Craigslist has leapt over tipping point to the successful stage of positive feedback development. And in China, dozens of websites are doing the same thing, the market has been divided, and everyone is caught in the low-level vicious competition under the critical point.

Pessimists believe that no Chinese site can reach the tipping point market until the money is burned down, and it is too late to plunge into the community.

Need Credit System

Trust！ Trust！ Trust！

In this rich but irregular environment, for all enterprises, a common important challenge is to establish a "credit system" in the Internet environment, thus reducing the user churn rate.

"If you can break through the credit, classified information will have a bigger market." "One of the features of the classified information Web site is Network marketing, or it's an important way of precision marketing," says Yiu Jingbo. Marketing means trust, and in this regard, many sites are exploring.

China's existing classified information sites are basically taken by the user to register their own free to publish information, the lack of information authenticity of the process, which is difficult to ensure the authenticity of information is the biggest factor. This means that the classified information site, in addition to the need for strong technical backing, but also need to be equipped with adequate service capabilities.

At present, 58 city attempts to link the information with the blog, forum ID, mobile phone, mailbox, to form the retrospective of personal online history. Through this retrospective, users will be informed of each other's situation, both sides will know how much trust each other. Another way is to get netizens involved in information management, to evaluate every piece of information, when a message is five people as spam, the system will automatically block it, of course, all people have the right to complain, customer service will immediately review the information, so that netizens participate in the credit rating of a person, the longer the participation of the site's history, The higher the corresponding credibility, the more important the information will be posted.

As with ebay's success, the most important factor is its "feedback system", which is used to rank the reliability of buyers or sellers. Buyers and sellers know that each transaction will be rated and recognize the importance of maintaining credibility. As a result, sellers will consciously classify their products for sale and quickly deliver them to buyers, who will also pay for the products they buy. For the system, the key to its power is reciprocity.

In fact, people today are less likely to trust the trust, preferring to believe in "Someone like Me". So how to decide who is trustworthy in the online world is critical.

An enterprise has posted a job information on a classified information website in China, and has selected 20 candidates to send an interview notice, but only one person came to the interview the next day. The lack of effective information, so that the entire classification of information industry, the integrity of the environment is questioned, more and more users began to lose, to 51job and other professional recruitment website. This change in the status quo, in addition to relying on a large number of human resources, but also need technical advance.

"Craigslist's most important core is the authenticity of web-platform publishing information. "said Howard Rheingold, a new media research expert. Newmark the elimination of malicious ads as their important work, the founder of the 10 hours a day the happiest thing is that his team can prevent, detect, delete malicious ads, false information to make a breakthrough in technology.

And another domestic classification information website Fige also adopted the garbage information screening technology, it can automatically filter and screen the information in the database of duplication, useless, to ensure that users from spam information harassment, improve the effectiveness of information, at the same time equipped with a person to conduct rigorous audit of information to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of information.

The new online credit system is being perfected, and the network based credit system may be the most effective guarantee for the development of the industry, compared with the traditional government regulation means.

Model reengineering

There are two kinds of fates of classified information sites that are still alive, one is alive, but from the signs of life, just barely struggling, such as the message tree, platform network, and so on, the other is 58 with the city, 263, guests, net, Word-of-mouth network, with the support of capital, still alive and kicking. But has been puzzling the classification information website's profit pattern question, nobody has completely solved.

Platform Network for the representative of the Standard Model relies on information to make money, through the release, browsing part of the information charge a certain fee. While this model has made Craigslist a significant gain, it is justified and qualified to charge users, assuming that it has a monopoly in the United States, occupies a huge market share, and has a very good habit of using users. But this model is still a long way to go in China.

In addition, many classified information sites in the market will be the core of their profit model in advertising, or some disguised advertising. There are many veterans who have struggled for years in the Internet.

Boutique network as a domestic from the paper media to the Internet classified advertising a typical, as early as in 1997, the "Boutique Shopping Guide" newspaper advertising content edited on the website, and in the subsequent development of the gradual expansion of their own classified information content. Their goal strategy is to become a guided precision marketing platform. But compared with foreign countries, the Chinese market has not yet nurtured enough users to access the media only through the Internet, so after nearly 10 years of development, boutique network still does not attract enough attention to sell to advertisers.

In fact, classified advertising in the United States has formed a mature advertising model, some newspaper giants have to transition to the network. According to Mr Murdoch, classified advertising is the "source" of the newspaper industry, but "sometimes money dries up". The exhaustion he refers to is the economic threat that Craigslist poses to traditional newspapers. Just as Wikipedia is largely comparable to existing encyclopedias and has an automatic extension, Craigslist and other classified information sites are better and cheaper alternative media for newspaper classifieds.

However, the domestic classified information Web site has not yet formed a sufficient monopoly, it is difficult to make the ads on its platform to achieve good results, and therefore can not compete with the advantages of vertical sites in various industries. This is one of the reasons why many classified information pioneers do not want to put themselves in the category of classified ads.

In addition to the above two models, to 263 online as a representative of several classified information sites to use information platform, in some industries began to provide users with in-depth services, in order to obtain benefits from the service. 263 online currently in the real estate, automotive, catering and other industries launched by the network brokers, second-hand car online assessment overcharging, as well as ordering discount service has been recognized by users, and is gradually expanding the scale.

The characteristic of classified information is geographical, so its soil is more suitable to cultivate the mode of life service, and the profit pattern of earning by service is very considerable, because the demand of life service is very frequent, and the service market is relatively mature and the profit is higher. But things always have two sides, many users are not too accustomed to through the Internet to meet their needs for life, which requires a strong online promotion ability, at the same time to meet the needs of the user's life, but also need a strong resources and service capabilities, these are not overnight.

"It's a very real market and we don't want to keep it by burning money," he said. "Yiu Jingbo thinks, do classified information peace talks profit is two different, online market scale is really big, but that is not in the short term can be cultivated." As a result, he bought a "community know-it-All" offline direct investment magazine, while in Beijing more than 500 residential areas in the installation of LED electronic screen equipment, and called it "community notice."

Meanwhile, the Wang Jianyue, which has been affected by Craigslist, has experimented on the profit model. For example, let the user spend 2 yuan to send information again, and give a top 1 hours, and spend 20 yuan, you can put up a day. At the same time, users can also use points in exchange for similar functions. In marketing, he proposed a "distributed E-commerce" slogan, through the provision of APIs and personal webmaster cooperation to form a Web site alliance, this channel customization has been bonded to users up to 13,000 people, and bring hundreds of thousands of of page browsing volume. Wang Jianyue that time + products will determine the core competitiveness of classified information sites.

Who's the classified information network, Gordo?

The operators of the classified information website claimed to be waiting for Gordo, but who is Gordo? When do they meet? Even they are not clear. But they were still waiting.

All the social creations that human beings have shown so far often contain some loneliness before they are known and accepted. After several years of silence, China's classified information industry is still creating its own essence, its creative way is changing.

' The classified information industry in China is still in its infancy, but this phase is nearing its end and now everyone is starting to cool, ' said Kosching, who is online. Because in the initial stage, the classification of information sites to innovate, need three years or more time, when one day the domestic companies are used to promote online, classified information on the prosperity.

Hu Yichang said that the Chinese classified information should be out of the current state of calm, the development of the industry is a protracted war, should be a lifelong business to operate. Although currently subject to a number of constraints, but the enterprise will continue to improve to do better, and constantly improve the user experience to create social value. The real boom in China's classified information market may come in the next 2-3 years.

Zhu Li, 263 online, said this is a long-term process, the classification of information industry is not the real problem of users, but customers, let small business owners slowly understand the online release of classified ads is effective, let them gradually accept the network, the process will take at least three years.

When classified information was just emerging, there were many people who judged that classified information was the bubble of the Internet. For classified information, there is no denying that there is a bubble, but it is not a bubble, but a deep onerous China's torrent, it stirred layers of waves, and the bubble is only those who can not meet the needs of users and eliminated the inferior enterprises.

In the 2008, China's Internet population will surpass that of the United States and be promoted to the world's largest Internet users. For netizens, the most close to their own must be their lives, and face the Internet, the most convenient way to exist, a large number of users of the classification of information needs will converge into a huge market.

Of course, as a new mode of information utilization, the industry in the progress of the inevitable need for continuous running-in and improvement, to face the challenges and the test is also unpredictable, the major service providers need to do is to gather knowledge reserves, insight into market development and change, close to the needs of netizens, continuous innovation, integration, so that the halo of Information Services classification strong dazzling.

In this need to pay a few years to achieve the process, need a kind of motivation, or just a simple dream. It may be so unreal that we are not sure whether all possibilities will come true in the future and lead to a more practical internet, but at least the waiting people believe-we are not playing games with ourselves, Godo.