The inexorable trend towards free classifieds

Free classifieds – yes they exist – but the reality is that free classifieds can only ever be temporarily free. As you know, it costs money to run a website, and even legendary ‘free classifieds’ companies like Craiglist, Simply Hired, Google and so on are all now monetising their previously free listings. No-one has quite cracked the permanently-free classifieds listings for very good reason – there’s no free lunch, there’s no such thing as a cost-free website.

Free classifieds did not necessarily mean no revenue to me Carey; I think it rather implied that income would come from higher-value offerings other than straight listings.

That’s true, but low revenue ain’t that attractive either!

The key question for me is what percentage of ‘free’ ads can you actually monetise? Maybe 10%? Even Google at 8 ads per page can’t monetise 10%.

In Australia there are only say 250,000 primary-source job ads out there, and if you’re monetising 10% – 25,000 of them (big if)- , you’re going to have to price each monetised ad way above what the market is prepared to pay in order to recover the cost of data aggregation, marketing and your website costs etc. You’ll only be able to charge anything if you have the traffic volumes of course, another seriously big if.

If you’re Google then this is all incremental revenue etc but I’m personally not sure the size of the market in Australia would be that attractive for Google compared to other markets. For an stand-alone aggregator or a facebook type operation in Australia, I’m not sure free classifieds is sustainable given the need to derive at least some revenue to recover your costs. The small population, low job ad pricing by international standards, fierce marketing dollars competition and the difficulty of attracting significant traffic in order to secure the dollars makes Australia a particularly unattractive market I think.

Not that that’s stopping every man and his dog setting up some sort of job board these days!