Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly “verticalizing.” Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among existing vertical success stories, such as AutoTrader, Cars.com, Realtor.com and ServiceMagic.
The Marketplaces 2010 conference reveals …

EBay is expected to dramatically boost its efforts in classifieds in 2010, so we welcome clues into its historical and current thinking into classifieds via eBay vs. Craigslist.  EBay has been seeking redress from Craigslist, which has diluted its 28 percent ownership share to 24 percent in a bid to squeeze out its influence. Craigslist, …

Facing up to the reality of a real estate market in which many houses for sale end up becoming “shadow” rentals, Zillow has added rental listings and information to its real estate services. At the same time, Zillow is attaching a $9.95 premium for listings to be posted for six months, which represents the first …

It would be a pity if The New York Times Co.’s Boston Globe were shut down, because its Boston.com site continues to innovate with local online advertising capabilities. Today, the company’s YourTown hyperlocal sites launched Flyerboards: a virtual bulletin board on which businesses can post “flyers” to advertise their services and events.
The technology behind Flyerboard, …

We’re always looking for what’s up and down in the economy. One likely contender:  garage sales.
According to coverage in the L.A. Times, garage sale postings on Craigslist are up 80 percent nationwide (and 50 percent in the L.A. area).

MySpace and Citysearch today confirmed the launch of MySpace Local, a new local city guide using functionality and feeds from Citysearch, including its taxonomy of categorization, geography structure, search functionality and content. A beta version of the site launches this week, with a general U.S. launch next month. It will be available on the Web …

One of the great mysteries is what Wal-Mart is really doing with classifieds. Last June, it signed up to use the Oodle platform, but not much has been heard from it since.
In this week’s Ad Age, Wal-Mart’s Duncan Dreschel sheds a little light, noting that the company seeks to simultaneously extend the brand, drive traffic …

Online leads for cars are broken. The vast majority of auto shoppers won’t even fill out a request for bid because they think they’ll get inaccurate, incomplete and tardy information from the dealer.
But that doesn’t stop vendors from working on better solutions. Today, Cobalt’s Dealix division rolled out a new leads platform that it claims …

Gabriels and Endeca have launched a new white-label auto portal. The effort formally kicks off a recently announced partnership to inject Endeca’s search capabilities into Gabriels’ vertical sites.
The new portal moves away from a simple listing product, offering a stronger media play that can compete with industry leaders such as AutoTrader and Cars.com. The site …

The New York Times publishes separate sports and business sections on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It may soon move away from separate sections altogether. This past Saturday, there was not a single display ad in either the sports or the news sections of the paper. There was less than a quarter page of classified advertising.

Oodle CEO Craig Donato led off day three of Marketplaces 2009 describing how classified advertising has gone through an evolution over the past five years, progressing from simply importing them online, to making them searchable and finally today integrating classifieds with social media/user-generated content (UGC). Donato pointed out that while newspapers led the way in …

AOL Yellow Pages has greatly benefited from search engine optimization, with 50 percent of its traffic coming from SEO, according to Chris Spanos, GM, local search, who was speaking today at Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in Los Angeles. “We have a very healthy Yellow Pages business,” said Spanos, who called it “the No. 1 independent Yellow …

Rob Curley and Chris Jennewein of Greenspun Interactive gave a lively presentation this morning at the Marketplaces conference representing the yin and yang of product features and business models. This is often in a state of imbalance at online newspaper entities.
Greenspun runs the Las Vegas Sun and a number of other properties, including a handful …

Is it really so easy for the Facebooks and Wal-Marts of the world to use a national platform like Oodle or LiveDeal to successfully launch classifieds? Jay Schauer, a friend who runs Ad2Ad.com, doesn’t think so. (Among other services, Ad2Ad automates classifieds for community and college newspapers.)
Schauer complains that “people seem to assume that classified …

LiveDeal, under new management, has moved away from its roots in Yellow Pages and classifieds, and begun a strategic focus on high-end SMB services. As part of its strategy, the company has been selling off many of its directory-related accounts, which CEO Mike Edelhart calls high maintenance, high churn, low yielding and declining.
To date, 24,000 …

Oodle has been describing itself as a “social classifieds” platform for some time, extending its reach via deals with local powerhouses such as AOL, Comcast, Cox, Media General, Freedom and Wal-Mart. Now, it is set to make the hype more of a reality with dramatic enhancements that will power Facebook Marketplaces.
The launch strives to leverage …

There is a certain magic with coining a far-out name that really sticks, like “Google” or “Yahoo.” Apparently, the new folks running eBay Classifieds, however, don’t think that “Kijiji” has made the grade. Kijiji, which is Swahili for “village,” is eBay’s homegrown version of Craigslist.
Key categories include motors, pets, goods, services, housing, jobs and personals. …

Earlier this week I went to hear an economist offer his take on the current economy and how soon it would recover. Long story short, I believe the speaker, who had outstanding credentials, was overly optimistic. (I really believe he may have been on vacation on some secluded island for the past year.) In fact, his …

Cablevision bet big on synergy (and ignored the CW about the newspaper industry) when it bought Newsday from Tribune Co. last summer for $650 million. Today, less than eight months later, it concedes that it has written off $402 million of that investment (a significantly worse investment than Stephen Marbury of Cablevision’s Knicks).
Whether the economics …

Cazoodle, a new listings-based service, has launched from the incubator at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (yes, Marc Andreeson’s former territory). The site currently crawls for apartment listings and shopping. Additional vertical categories such as events are anticipated, notes Professor Kevin Chang, who is supervising seven graduate students on the project. “We have the …