Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Rural Markets are Underserved

Craigslist disrupting the classified industry is well-documented and can be seen through the demise of classified revenue of daily newspapers.. While Craigslist has had a profound impact on urban areas, rural markets are still underserved. We have seen this first hand because of the increase in our website traffic the last year. Our website traffic is up 39% the last 30 days, year over year. We haven't released  earth shattering technology, but yet we have seen great growth. We have seen great growth because we have given our area a local platform. We  locally connect producers and consumers as well as service providers with those that need services.

Our print product is the leading driver to our growth online, coupled with a platform that has more technology supporting it than is visually apparent. We have spent over four years building our platform without taking one month off from improving the software functions. We have evolved the platform over that time period to address the wants of today's search engines and mobile users. I specifically say mobile because over half our traffic is now mobile and our responsive design gives the mobile user a fully optimized experience while using our website.

We had a photo problem at first because most of our online listings to start came from our print product. We solved this problem with two different software functions. The first is an email that is sent to the customer that placed the classified ad when their ad goes live on our website. The email asks the user to respond to the email with photos of their listing. This has had great response because it is simple to use. The user can simply take a picture with their mobile phone and reply to the email with the picture attached. Our software will automatically add the photo to their classified ad. The other cool feature is the ability for a consumer to click the location of where photos appear on a ad detail page which triggers an email to the seller requesting a photo. The combination of these features has lead to a more than 2,415 photos being added to our marketplace and has consequently given shoppers a much better experience.

The next wave of disrupters are being funded hundreds of millions of dollars every month from private equity. Some of them will succeed because they find a market that is underserved or that meets the requirements for their platform or marketplace to succeed. However, many will fail because they don't have the local knowledge and trust that our brands provide our markets. We have the advantage of learning from the successes and failures of these new technology companies and we will use their successes to our advantage. Their success is a blueprint for our company to use to build a better product to serve our local community.

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