virtualeconomics

Salaryshare and the data opportunity for jobs aggregators

It always worries me when I see companies launch that it seems any one of a dozen other companies could trivially kill with a few days dev work. I wonder if I'm missing something.

SalaryShare lets you see what your friends/colleagues/random strangers earn by pooling salary data anonymously from anyone who chooses to share it and then revealing the range of salaries disclosed to all participants. Nice idea. I have indeed occasionally been curious as to what other people earn.

Thing is...if people want to know that badly, can't one of the jobs boards (or more usefully jobs aggregators) simply store data on the salaries that were listed on historical job ads and make it searchable?

You say "local business directory", I say "white flag"

This dropped through my door last week. The picture pretty much says it all. Once upon a time strong men would prove their incredible manhood by tearing a phone book in half. I could tear this one in half myself, a pamphlet that has halved in size in every dimension in the merest handful of years. When I first saw it on the mat I just laughed.

Amazon dating

It occured to me yesterday that Amazon should offer a dating service.

They have all the information that it could possibly be useful to know about a prospective partner. How much do they spend on books? Which books do they buy? How close to publication date do they buy the important ones? Their reviews record would probably be handy too, just to make sure they understood what they were reading. Amazon has locational data for all its customers of course, so all they'd need to do is tweak some privacy settings, add a photo upload facility and let people search for cute potential partners near them who love the same books.

How hard has the loss of adult services hit Craigslist's traffic?

Four months ago Craigslist pulled the Adult Services section on its US websites. Quietly, without fanfare or announcement, but all the same they were gone. Then at the very end of the year the company confirmed that the section had been removed from its sites worldwide (slightly oddly, since it was pressure from US Attorneys General that caused the original change, but all the same they're gone too). 

The removal of the section was estimated by AIM Group to cost Craigslist $36m pa or about a third of its total revenue. But for a company that famously doesn't care about the money, this can hardly be a significant issue. What matters is whether it costs them traffic and the opportunity to connect people with the services they want to find. 

Yellow Pages: your medium is dying. Stop pretending it's a benefit

Amused by a Yellow Pages poster that recently appeared at the top of my street:

There's something faintly admirable in the brazenness of pitching the fundamental structural collapse of your core business as a benefit. Let's take a brief glance at the numbers behind "the new compact Yellow Pages". 

Between 2009 and 2010 (pdf) Yell's UK printed directory revenues (thus, from Yellow Pages) fell c20% from c£500m to c£400m. Total number of print advertisers fell 14.4% from 390k to 335k; the number of different directories published fell from 113 to 105; advertiser retention rate slipped fractionally from 73% to 72% (despite an explicit strategic focus on customer retention); and revenue per advertiser fell 5.5% from £1,293 to £1,222. A more recent half-year release (pdf) from last week shows total revenues for the group down 8.9% for the first half of the(ir financial) year but doesn't break out region or medium. Ars Technica also reported last week that in the US, White Pages providers are seeking permission to stop providing White Pages, which is a less than rosy sign for the print directories industry. In summary, the print business, while facing some fairly obvious cyclical challenges as well, is mostly challenged by a structural collapse as its legacy gateway monopoly gets the now-familiar run-around from a plethora of much cheaper options online.

Hence, one must assume, "the new compact Yellow Pages". When your advertisers numbers are falling at a rate of 14% a year your ad-supported directory product is indeed going to get a lot smaller. But it's still a bit odd to gloat about the fact on a billboard. 

The voices in my head turned out to be Sergey and Larry

Via pmarca - the first voiceless phonecalls from Ambient Corporation.

Their wireless neckband "can intercept signals from the brain to the vocal cords, even if no sounds is made". It's around 2:24 that it gets even more interesting when  presenter Michael Callahan suggests that the device could ultimately recognise a user's desire for any sort of information - local restaurants, bus schedules - and retrieve the relevant data from Google. Just how many years has it taken us to get from listing businesses in local newspapers and phone directories to having answers beamed directly into our brains?

Lots more on Techmeme today.

Newspaper decline merely cynical, sorry "cyclical"

Sly Baily, CEO of Trinity Mirror, became the latest newspaper exec to make the extraordinary claim this week that the downturn in print advertising is a more a cyclical than structural phenomenon (Guardian).

This is a claim trotted out from time to time by optimistic print executives: it’s last fervent proponent was Tim Bowdler at Johnston in December (Independent), by an amusing coincidence just after his group launched a flurry of initiatives to secure a share of the growing local digital market and began converging newsrooms. Manifestly, while there may well be some cyclical elements to the current downturn of print advertising, it is fundamentally a structural phenomenon as every generation since at least the Second World War has contained fewer newspaper readers than the last (see as ever Philip Meyer’s Vanishing Newspaper) and attention, especially amongst those people most attractive to advertisers, continues to relocate from print to web.

Every person who finds a job online is a person who has not used a newspaper for that task. Fifteen Twenty years ago there was no web and no jobs websites. In November, says comScore, in the UK slightly more than nine million people - almost a third of the online population - looked for a job online. That's a structural change. 

Zillow is the new Igglo

News today from both Om and TechCrunch that US real estate site Zillow has finally developed an innovation that I've been waiting for a while to see make its way to the English-speaking world - passive property sales.

Zillow's new "make me move" facility let's homeowners not exactly put their house up for sale but give potential buyers a nod and a wink that, you know, it might be for sale at the right price. Combined with the "claim your house" feature added two months ago, and already attracting 250,000 claims, Zillow's approach to opening up the US passive real estate market most closely mirrors Finland's Igglo. Of course, Igglo simply catalogued every house in Helsinki and then launched its database onto the market, a more comprehensive approach to the problem - but then, Helsinki has a population of 564,643, a different problem altogether to the US 300 million.

I've noted before how impressed I am at Igglo's articulation as business strategy the old adage that everything is for sale at the right price. Along with Zebo, it is this sort of redrawing of the online sales map to include everything, even things that might not be ostensibly on the table, that will take online classifieds to the next level. Much as - to return to yesterday's theme - LinkedIn has the opportunity to leverage its rich employment data to redefine the jobs market to annihilate the distinction between employees (and indeed jobs) that are available and those that are not, Zillow has a chance to redefine the property market to reflect the reality that everything is, however tacitly, actually in play if you're able to name the right price.

The new and better eBay

Peter Cashmore at Mashable reviewed super-fast-growing new social network Zebo yesterday and stopped just short of calling their acquisition of four million users in one week sinister. It's certainly inexplicably rapid.

I proposed in June that sooner or later a site would emerge for listing everything a person owned, and that site would be the next eBay. Enter Zebo. Currently, it's "just" a social networking play. People list their possessions and hook up with other users exhibiting similar consumer preferences (and with my usual cynic's hat on I note that this is going to lead to some almost unbelievably superficial friendships and dating experiences). But the commercial value of a repository of what everyone owns is immense. Want a first edition Animal Farm (as Adrian Mole says, I had one once but some bastard called Eric Blair had scribbled in it)? Want a Maserati V8? Want a private Caribbean island? Someone somewhere's got one, and while it's not necessarilly for sale (and therefore not on eBay)...everything is for sale at the right price, and Zebo is there to take a cut. eBay's a great marketplace for things that people are actively selling. Zebo fills the gap for things they didn't even think they wanted to sell, but might for the right offer - for the passive classifieds market. That's what's really meant by "the world's online marketplace".

Everything for sale at the right price

An ingenious Finnish company, Igglo, has put flesh on the bones of the old adage "everything is for sale at the right price". Quoth Springwise:

"The Finnish company has photographed every building in Helsinki, with more towns to follow, and combines these photographs with satellite images and maps. Every property is listed, not just those that are currently on the market. (Their tagline is: "Your house is already on Igglo.")"

This is essentially the end-point of the digital marketplace - where absolutely everything is listed by a central facilitator and buyers and sellers come together whenever a price can be agreed, quite regardless of the fiction governing whether or not a thing is "for sale". Everything is for sale. (Incidentally it's not clear to me why eBay isn't doing this already in the  second-hand merchandise market - I occasionally wonder idly if two million cuecat scanners are still going for thee dimes a pop, and if so whether eBay will ever pick them up and send them to users so as to scan in all their possessions against the possibility of a good enough offer? I might not have been planning to sell my George R R Martin first editions any more than I was planning to sell my house, but there are possibly people out there who would offer me enough to change my mind.)

Possibly a similar model will emerge in recruitment - all CVs and all jobs posted online, and if there's someone out there who'd be better at your job and willing to do it, everyone knows it immediately and you're out. (That's pretty much already the model in professional sports, of course. The difference in the professional sports is cultural - that everyone acknowledges this is the situation - and informational - the market is small enough for everyone to have all the information on both sides.)

And so Igglo. A good start. A taste of things to come in a number of other markets. And a hint of what happens when all of the information can be available to everybody all of the time.