Community-Charged Classifieds
I apologize to the people who read this blog for being so silent lately. But if you've been reading it for long, you know that this usually happens because there's a lot of stuff going on. And that's true this time as well.
Yesterday, we made what is arguably the biggest single leap ever with the Bakomatic platform. It now controls all aspects of the Classified ads on Bakersfield.com. Everything you see there -- from the search and navigation to category listings to ads and photos -- is run by Bakomatic. The exceptions are jobs and real estate, which are still run by vendors.
You may say, "So what? Every newspaper has Classified ads." But what's different is this: the same system that manages user-contributed content and social networking is also running the user-contributed Classified advertising.
All of that content is in one database, and that will let us do some things that we were never able to do before and really start to think about and present the Classifieds in a different way. We think this is incredibly important given the amount of money generated by Classifieds and the various competitors out there who are hoping to steal that business.
So what kinds of new things can we do? Well, to start with, we can morph Classified categories into topical interest communities.
Our first innovation in this area is to create a back-end tool that lets editors match Classified categories with the interests and blog topics users have entered. For example, in the Pets category, anyone who enters "cat," "dog" or a number of different animals into the tag field of their blog or as one of their profile interests will see their content instantly promoted to people who are looking for puppies.
If we suddenly see a lot of content tagged "house rabbit," we can go to the tool and associate that tag as well. Maybe we see tags about a totally new trend we've never heard of -- such as Pokemon back in the 1990s. We can leverage its popularity by tying it to a category so more people see it.
Our internal name for this concept is a Tagonomy, since it brings tags into an existing taxonomy. We hope to do more around this with areas outside of Classifieds, such as the categories on The Northwest Voice or newspaper sections.
Other things we'll be able to do in the future include:
What I think this means at a philosophical level is that Classifieds will no longer be off in an "advertising" silo, separated from a "content" silo. We now see more clearly than ever that classified ads are content, and probably one of the oldest forms of user-contributed content in newspapers (or for that matter, in civilization). That's how consumers see them, and they don't understand why newspapers as an industry present Classifieds in a way that is so disjointed from the rest of the newspaper offering.
bakomatic
bakersfield californian
classifieds
community
Yesterday, we made what is arguably the biggest single leap ever with the Bakomatic platform. It now controls all aspects of the Classified ads on Bakersfield.com. Everything you see there -- from the search and navigation to category listings to ads and photos -- is run by Bakomatic. The exceptions are jobs and real estate, which are still run by vendors.
You may say, "So what? Every newspaper has Classified ads." But what's different is this: the same system that manages user-contributed content and social networking is also running the user-contributed Classified advertising.
All of that content is in one database, and that will let us do some things that we were never able to do before and really start to think about and present the Classifieds in a different way. We think this is incredibly important given the amount of money generated by Classifieds and the various competitors out there who are hoping to steal that business.
So what kinds of new things can we do? Well, to start with, we can morph Classified categories into topical interest communities.
Our first innovation in this area is to create a back-end tool that lets editors match Classified categories with the interests and blog topics users have entered. For example, in the Pets category, anyone who enters "cat," "dog" or a number of different animals into the tag field of their blog or as one of their profile interests will see their content instantly promoted to people who are looking for puppies.
If we suddenly see a lot of content tagged "house rabbit," we can go to the tool and associate that tag as well. Maybe we see tags about a totally new trend we've never heard of -- such as Pokemon back in the 1990s. We can leverage its popularity by tying it to a category so more people see it.
Our internal name for this concept is a Tagonomy, since it brings tags into an existing taxonomy. We hope to do more around this with areas outside of Classifieds, such as the categories on The Northwest Voice or newspaper sections.
Other things we'll be able to do in the future include:
- Instantly surface Classified ads from The Bakersfield Californian on the Web sites of our other brands, which themselves now account for 30% of all Web traffic for the company (and growing).
- Enable Classifieds on those other brands and allow them to be shared in the same way.
- Let people pay more to have their ads promoted to a larger audience, both in terms of brands and tagged content or pages elsewhere on Bakersfield.com and our network.
- And most promising of all: soon, the same publishing tool used to publish blogs and articles -- with photos, YouTube videos and the like -- will be able to be used to place online Classified ads. And just in case anyone is wondering, no that does not mean we will be giving all online ads away for free. Why do that when we're creating so much more value than anyone else can provide in Bakersfield?
What I think this means at a philosophical level is that Classifieds will no longer be off in an "advertising" silo, separated from a "content" silo. We now see more clearly than ever that classified ads are content, and probably one of the oldest forms of user-contributed content in newspapers (or for that matter, in civilization). That's how consumers see them, and they don't understand why newspapers as an industry present Classifieds in a way that is so disjointed from the rest of the newspaper offering.
bakomaticbakersfield californianclassifiedscommunity
posted by Dan at
4/06/2007 07:58:00 AM
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