Kitmondo.com

Process

Vicki has created a great graphic to illustrate our classifieds distribution process (click on the image for a pop-up):

1. An equipment seller creates a classified advert on Kitmondo.com
2. The advert is distributed to relevant publishers and to Kitmondo.com’s own audience
3. A user completes the “Contact the Seller” form
4. The enquiry is verified by Kitmondo and non-authentic enquiries filtered out
5. A sales lead is forwarded to the advertiser who accesses the user’s contact details

A Very Exciting Day!

The first implementation of our publisher classifieds solution went live on cinamatography.com a couple of days ago and now we're all set to announce it. It looks great, works great and is already generating lead revenue (hurrah!). Thanks are due to Geoff and Jitendra at the Kitmondo end and Tim at cinematography.com for their combined efforts on getting this up on schedule.

To mark this fine day I’ll be issuing the following release:

Kitmondo.com Launches Cost-per-Lead Classifieds Solution for Online Publishers
Startup introduces online classified advertising solution for B2B publishers and announces first partner.

- 8th March 2006 - Online classifieds pioneer Kitmondo.com today announces the first implementation of its cost-per-lead classified advertising solution. Specialist broadcast publication cinematography.com has integrated Kitmondo’s solution to offer a ready-made “Equipment For Sale” section to its audience of broadcast professionals (http://www.cinematography.com/classifieds/).

Kitmondo delivers relevant classified advertising content to publishers of trade or B2B related websites enabling them to create instantly successful classified sections. Uniquely, each classified advert generates revenue on a cost-per-lead basis. When an advertiser receives a qualified enquiry they pay a fee, which Kitmondo then shares with the publisher.

“Classified advertising isn’t working for online B2B publishers. Visit the classifieds section of any major online trade publication and you’ll find few advertisers and little user activity” says Kitmondo CEO Richard Barker. “Online advertisers don’t want to pay upfront charges so classifieds quickly wither and die. By offering cost-per-lead charging, Kitmondo’s advertisers only pay when a customer contacts them, so they’re highly motivated to place adverts.”

Publishers simply choose the categories of equipment most relevant to their audience and the Kitmondo system automatically creates an appropriate XML feed containing the ads. Its cost-per-lead charging system manages the collection of payments from advertisers.

"Kitmondo has thousands of equipment listings that enabled us to create an instantly viable classified section for our specific audience of film and video professionals.” says Tim Tyler, publisher of cinematography.com. “Whenever a Kitmondo advertiser receives a sales-lead from one of our users, Kitmondo pays us a fee. It’s an easy to implement, easy to use system where everybody involved wins."

Still in its beta period, Kitmondo has attracted more than 6,500 equipment classified adverts from advertisers in 44 countries.

Lead Verification #2

The verification issue may also have an increasing impact on how advertisers (in this sector at least) value ppc advertising. With capital equipment advertisers regularly paying $1 a click on Google and applying a reasonable 5% conversion rate (visitor to enquiry), leads are costing $20 a piece. No advertiser will spend $20 a piece on leads like the one illustrated in my previous post. Not for long anyway.

Henry Blodget suggests there may be some advertisers who have already done the math.

We’ve quickly realised that our verification process is a valuable add-on for our advertisers, especially larger dealers who receive multiple enquiries from different advertising sources. The ability to focus resources on the most promising leads is a considerable benefit.

Lead Verification

Having mentioned listing verification in my previous post I thought it would be worth dwelling on the subject of lead verification as well. In many ways, verifying the leads we send to advertisers is even more important for us than keeping the listings clean. In terms of advertiser confidence, it probably takes 5 good leads to make up for a single bad one so identifying fraud, spam and timewasters is a big part of our model.

Here's an example of a bad lead:

Buyer Information:
Buyer Email:      brow****@lawyer.com
Name:      Brown adams
Telephone No.:      +44 207 882 ****
Company :      
Message :      Hi, We are a procurement concern and we specialise inpurchasing preowned goods on behalf of our clients worldwide. We however have and order for the aboveDVW-790WSP and our client is offering to buy these for the sum of € 28900 Please We will arrange to remit payment for purchase to you . a prepaid shipper will come to your home for pickup. Best Regards, Brown....

Although the email address and telephone number checked out, the message tells us enough to put this is down as a fraudulent enquiry.  The ability to pick up on text clues such as specific  shipping/payment terms or price agreement (non of which a genuine buyer would discuss in an initial enquiry) is why we think human verification is so imprtant.

Album of the Week

by Vicki

Brushfire Fairytales by  Jack Johnson

Listening to commercial radio all day kind of turns your brain to mush, but along comes Jack Johnson and he snaps you right back and into reality and out again into a space where you kinda feel like giggling and dancing and clapping. Well what can I say, his music, ah the lyrics, poetry turned to sound, well, it makes me feel, happy. Give a listen to flake, Bubblegum toes, F-Stop Blues, oh what the heck just listen to the whole album. Brushfire Fairytales is my favourite album, but I'd recommend his later works as well, On and On and In Between Dreams. Feel good, easy listening stuff this is.

On Edgeio

I’ve followed an interesting conversation between the founders of edgeio (a classifieds tagging platform), its supporters and detractors.

One of the concerns voiced by the detractors is how edgio will combat spam listings. On the surface of it, anyone with a blog or RSS enabled site can tag a posting with the word “listing” and edgeio will pick it up and publish. So anyone looking for traffic could quickly rack up some link love at edgeio’s expense (“For Sale: Boxed PS3, only $50” anyone??). 

Edgio are keen to acknowledge the importance of listings validity and are implementing various technical measures to try and reduce the level of spam. Mostly however, they seem to relying on their own users to flag any bogus adverts, a feature that is common amongst classifieds platforms. Ourselves included.

It’s a laudable philosophy to motivate the community to ensure the validity of your listings and to keep the spammers at bay. Unfortunately the motivations of the greedy will always overcome those of the fair-minded and so a self-policing strategy will only ever be a surface deep solution. Human monitoring and verification is expensive and full-o-friction but it’s the only way to ensure clean listings.  Put it this way, there’s a reason Craig Newmark is the world’s most famous customer service manager!