Vast.com - Classifieds Search
I discovered naval’s blog and also about Vast couple of days back. Today i come across paul kedrosky’s review about Vast.com and it’s strategy.
Vast.com is a vertical search engine for classifieds. I can think of few yahoo!s that will go - “I tried really hard to convince the powers @yahoo! that we should build this 2 years back!, but we did not invest in this area”. Vast claims to have a lot of listings (4m+ cars, 6m+ jobs etc) and the number of listings is very important in the classifieds market. Vast.com as a site looks pretty good, but i’d have to play with a bit more to see what they do well.
Paul noted that they make all of the listings available via 3rd party apis for free, even for commercial use. He seemed quite surprised by it. My take is, that it’ simple. In the classifieds business, listings are content, and listings are ads. Ads and content are the same thing! So by allowing people to syndicate listings, vast is simply expanding their distribution. If you are familiar with classifieds business, it’s obvious why you do it. Classifieds Ads (listings) are worth based on distribution. You’d be willing to pay 40$/listing in ebay, where a lot of people would see your ad, but probably not be willing to pay 10$/listing on my blog. The more your distribution, the higher the listing fees you can charge. Also, ebay/autotrader illustrate that the site with most listings(most ads, most content) draws disproportionately higher traffic.
So, this seemingly philanthropic move is quite simply, the most sensible business move.
Good luck Vast.com!
March 15th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
my impression is that the data that is syndicated is just raw listings, so VAST is not propagating their own brand or content just the raw lisitngs which they aggregate so in this way there is not clear up side for them - is there?
March 16th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I think there is huge upside. Look at the car vendors they are crawling. Most of them are small time car dealers who have may be a 100 cars to sell. To them, being syndicated by vast would mean a lot of leads. If Vast is indeed able to distribute listings everywhere and generate leads for the businesses, there is a huge revenue opportunity for them. These small businesses will notice clicks!
March 16th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Well, I certainly agree that wide distribution of content is good, but I’m not quite sure I understand Vast’s business model. I’m guessing they’re trying to be the Amazon of Classifieds (a confederation of stores where Vast takes a certain percentage of sale or rate for distribution). Thing is, they don’t really own the content they’re distributing for free, at least, not yet from what I can tell. As you know, margins for classifieds aren’t really thick enough to afford a middleman without a darn good reason.
It’s interesting now. It’ll be more interesting in a few months from now.
April 6th, 2006 at 3:53 am
i too got the same feeling like harmony jones.. they just showing raw listings.the idea isn´t bad still it will take much to get a good number of clinets… lets see
all the best vast.com
cheers!
ravi