Classifieds, Junk Listings Problem

We know that there are many complaints about spam postings on Craigslist, since most postings are free. To date, the alternative to that has been to charge for listings from the time a site goes live, but that doesn’t work since it takes listings for a site to be popular, and nobody will pay at the beginning for such listings when the site is almost empty. Craigslist resolves this by activating listings for a city for many years, then begin charging when there are enough ads.  We think there is a different method that is more effective and efficient, and surprisingly easy: we offer ads for free, or for a price, depending on what the ad poster chooses, but then give the view the option of quickly removing from view all free ads, or ads below a certain price.

In other words, if a new city gets 100 ad postings every day, and 95 of those are free ads including many spam ads, and five ads are paid for ads, Wikimetro is set up to let a user quickly switch from viewing all ads, including free ads, to the five paid ads, so it isn’t necessary to scroll through the spam ads to find the good ones. And, it encourages ad posters to pay a fee, even a small fee, in whatever amount they choose as a way of verifying that their ad is legit.

Figuring Out How to Pay Bloggers

We’ve finally figured out a method for paying bloggers whose feeds we use. We have linked our paid classifieds with RSS feeds that arrive from blogs, and we pay per click. That’s it. The reason we can do this is because classifieds are placed on our site, and because bloggers register with us. We believe this is a new way to generate traffic and an effective way to distribute money. We will later need to figure out the correct percentages, but the core business process seems to make sense to us, .

Hiring PHP WikiMedia Programmers– The Next Step

We are now advertising and testing programmers with PHP skills– something not easy anywhere, and even more difficult here in China. The reason we need to do this in China is because there are more people and labor costs are a lot lower. It would be suicide to create this website paying western wages out of pocket with the hope that someone will one day fund it.

Adding Payment Systems

We’ve spent part of this week trying to figure out, after months thinking about this, if sales and customer service for tickets to local performances falls into the model of an ebay type sale, where all invoicing and customer service is done by the seller, or into the stubhub model, where the website company does this. We seem to fall somewhere in between. To set up customer service like stubhub would be a huge task, and for sales of tickets to low volume oulets, like school plays, there’s no way for us to offer customer service.

Java Script Used in Delete and Cancel Ads

Here’ s a nifty change we’ve just added. When you are in the mymwikimetro ad management area and you select delete or cancel an ad, we use a java script that makes it disappear like magic. We’ve seen this feature on other websites, liked it, and incorporated it. It doesnt make much of a substantive change to the site, but it definitely looks pretty neat.

Getting Tickets to Talk with Wiki

We are now focusing on getting the PHP side of this site (the Wiki) to talk to the asp.net side (classifieds and tickets). Not easy since each has different programmers. Nick handles the Wiki side, since that is his expertise and he is a Wiki Admin. We had to build the classifieds and tickets from scratch here– took months, but the result looks excellent. That was the job of Zhu Yi and his team.