PPC Affiliate Classifieds?
A little while ago, it became apparent that newspapers just couldn't compete with online classifieds. Even though they'd stepped up their online advertising efforts, they were still losing revenue. Basically, for newspapers, classified made up the bulk of their ad revenues. Online classifieds, on the other hand, use the classified ads as the content itself, and because of their comparatively low overhead, are able to subsist off of auxiliary ads such as PPC and banner ads.
Well, it looks like Listasaurus.com is upping the ante on the likes of Craigslist and Kijiji by not just offering free classified ad postings, but actually paying the advertisers for their ad. As a press release explains:
Sunrise, FL (PRWEB) May 2, 2007 -- It pays to list on Listasaurus.com…literally! Listasaurus.com announced today the launch of their new Pay Per Listing Program, where users will be paid cash for listing ads on the website. Listasaurus.com is the first online classifieds site to offer cash rewards for listing ads.
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With the new Pay Per Listing Program, when an ad is placed in an eligible category, the user will receive $.20 cents per listing. Eligible categories include Stuff for Sale, Free Stuff, and non-commercial Real Estate, Rentals and Vehicles. Listasaurus.com will pay users once a month when their reward amount has reached $5.00.
Now, in terms of online content, going from paying-for, to free, to getting-paid definitely seems to the logical progression. After all, affiliate marketing and rev-share programs are rather prevalent these days. Online video is just the latest of examples. On the one hand, ToonBreak shares revenues with featured cartoonists, and on the other, YouTube is expected to roll out it rev-share program for users within the next year. Although paying user for their online classifieds ads seems to have its problem, they are don't seem like challenging problems.
Most obvious, is that users now have a huge incentive to spam this site. Worse still, if the spam go out of control, not only would Listasaurus.com have to pay for that spam, but users would turn away as they realized that the majority of ads are spam. However, all that's needed to counteract this is an algorithm to flag one of two things: (1) duplicate content, and (2) duplicate IP addresses. The effort it would take to produce unique enough content to clear the screening process and use an IP switcher just isn't really worth the twenty cents gain per post. In fact, the know-how it would take to develop the artificial intelligence to fool such an algorithm is probably better invested in something that gets more than twenty cents a post.
Furthermore, Listasaurus.com is only paying out for certain categories of ads. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of their users never hit the minimum $5 mark it takes to have a single, measly, check issued.
In fact, the only thing that the folks at Listasaurus.com haven't seem to have thought out is their domain. The slight mispelling Listosauraus is forwarded to a small t-shirt shop on CafePress. Although the letter "A" (to my knowledge) would make up the proper spelling for actual dinosaur species, that does not mean that it is beyond users to type in what they think the name sounds like.
Then again, I'm sure that the vast majority of users will get it right the first time. However, those that don't will likely Google the term, and if they do so, the classified site appears nowhere on the first page of results. In fact, the first result is a blog by the mispelled name.
What's Listasaurus.com to lean from all this? Well, just some basic SEO really. First, although it is not all that bad, they should have put more thought into their domain. Consequently, they might want to snatch-up that mispelling of their name if it ever becomes available. Second, they might want to consider bidding on the mispelled version of their name with the major search engines. Until they've been around a while and start ranking well enough in the organic listings that the search engines will suggest the proper spelling to users who search the mispelled term, it would be a good idea to make sure that they are showing up somewhere on that page. Furthermore, I really doubt that ListOsauraus is a particularly competitive term (although it might be after enough people read this) so it shouldn't be too costly of a search engine marketing tactic to pursue.
