What's happened to Excite's Classifieds 2000?
Chris
sold off various bits of itself, but I've noticed something disturbing..
The way I understand it, any non @Home-related business Excite
was involved in has been sold to Iwon.com and Infospace.
Whoever they've sold the excellent Classifieds 2000 bit of the biz
to has a long way to go.
At first glance, it'd appear that Iwon and/or Infospace have
partnered with AutoTrader - effectively trashing C2K.
If this is the case, it's a travesty, as Im sure many of you
will agree, as Classifieds 2000 carried more real ads
from real people (as opposed to dealers & bogus ads)
for cars, trucks & motorbikes than any other online service.
Next runner-up was Yahoo Autos, but it couldn't ever really
hold a candle. Worse, it's gone downhill lately.
Both Infospace & Iwon seem to have gotten busy
re-branding & renaming their bits of the loot, but it's all
still looking pretty dodgy. Worse, aside from a few thin
press releases, information is hard to come by regarding
what the plan is for moving forward. All mail to any sort
of feedback at Iwon, Infospace & Excite seems to fall on
deaf ears or just bounce straightaway. Everyone I
personally knew at Excite has already been sacked,
so no enlightenment there.
What the heck's going on here? I honestly don't know
where I'm going to find 2 & 4 wheeled items to lust over now..
Anyone? Bueller?
cds
JG
vehicles - hands down.
The fact that they were so user friendly and free was likely their downfall
- it's more profitable to SELL advertising, and dealers are the primary
source of that kind of revenue. I've bought probably 50 vehicles through C2K
ads (buy, fix up & re-sell) because it was FULL of "real people's" ads.
AutoTrader.com, Yahoo classifieds & all the others just plain suck, and I've
seldom used them because of their lousy search interface (can't search for
more than one brand in a search - very tedious), and their ratio of dealer
to private ads (75% dealer ads are common) and often very small returns on
searches.
If I want to buy from a dealer, I'll just go to a local lot & get the same
price on the same thing without driving all over the place because some
dealer is doing a bait & switch in their ads (you can tell that they're
probably doing this by not listing the mileage, a BIG giveaway & not posting
a good picture of the car, making it easy to use one ad for a dozen
different cars).
As usual, the consumer gets the shitty end of the stick again. I'd love to
see C2K come back, but I'm not holding my breath. What a shame.
Cheers anyway,
- Jeff G