Just read an interesting interview in Business Week with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigs List. The company is one of the top 10 busiest sites in the world, yet only has 25 staff. Revenues are about $US25M. One would think a similar site would work well here in NZ due to our small size of country and small town feel. Most kiwi's don't even know what Craigslist is. Australia and New Zealand seem to be quite unique in the way that the big media giants have basically carved out the online market for classifieds and are charging good money for it.
Since the lead up to their sale, Trade me cleverly turned itself from an auction site to an auction/classified hybrid and started to cash in on real estate and more recently jobs. Good on them for doing so, lets hope a lot of that sale money gets reinvested back into the NZ economy to get the tech sector really cranking.
But now that the dust has settled and Trademe is owned by ozzies (Fairfax) surely a local startup that has no news media links whatsoever could take on the classified space and just leave auctions to Trade me (winner takes all for sure, Trademe rocks for auctions).
Its not gonna be easy as the other ozzie media giant on our shores (APN) is trying to take Fairfax on with Sellmefree which hasn't had any real uptake, especially in Wellington. Shows how good the Trademe brand is in the nations capital.
Food for thought huh? Any young whizzes out there, a good after school project.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment