Andy Kessler’s A Future for Newspapers in the (subscription required) WSJ makes a few good points: “Media, after all, is about owning a pipe …. The tighter the pipe, the less the competition.” For broadcasters, the pipe is spectrum For cable operators, it is often the sole cable franchise For phone companies, it’s those regulated …
Category Archives: Trade Me
Xero – projecting numbers
Jim Donovan’s En Avant suggests that picking Xero’s customer number is the same as picking Trade Me’s. Not so. Picking Trade Me’s potential customer base was not that difficult. Trade Me is in a winner take all geographically constrained C2C game. Once they were ahead it was pretty easy to make assumptions about how many …
eBay firefox extension toolbar
Just to add some more fuel to Rowan’s on-going discussion of a Trade Me API and gadgets, a group of Stanford design(!) students releases a Firefox eBay toolbar (actually a hacked version of Firefox) with big implications. The toolbar does the basics, but also removes all paid advertising and shows photos for all results of …
Drop off stores – will they work here?
Thinking of opening some Trade Me drop-off stores? After all – there is a gap in the market right? Drop off stores are big in the USA – they are places where you bring items for sale on eBay, and they list and sell them on eBay for you. The stores necessarily take a huge …
Amazon continues to make me think..
The other day I was surprised that Amazon was going to ship my order of 21 books in 19 different packages. On Friday night I picked up the first round of arrivals from Amazon. Over two days five boxes had arrived, each containing one book. Four of the books were identical (photo), and all of …
Netguide, Stuff, Trade Me, Pimp my plane…..
On the one hand I am not a big fan of the Netguide awards methodology. On the other hand Stuff managed to glean two awards (Best media site and best homepage), while Trade Me took home three more. Thanks to everyone that voted for us – both Trade Me and Stuff. It was a huge …
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Comparing Trade Me and eBay by the numbers
I’m not sure how many people realise just how good Trade Me is. Let’s look at some comparative public numbers against eBay. There are plenty of reasons behind the differences, and I’ll write about the publicly known ones sooner or later. Auctions Here’s an excerpt from a reply I made to this great post on …
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Cookies per computer
An average of 2.5 cookies were found per home computer in a US Survey [hat tip attentionmax] by Comscore. It seems that 31% of people delete their cookies at least once during the month*, and 7% delete them 4 times or more. Let’s see how that works in NZ. NetRatings shows there were 6.1m domestic …
Underpaid Kiwi executives
There are a few million dollar earning executives in NZ – and the Herald’s Owen Hembry believes that we are now on par with Australia, but that there is a gap underneath that. While we have a handful of CEO level people being paid well, there is a big payment hole in the next two …
Fairfax Digital
I’ve just been appointed Acting Head of Fairfax Digital, (Stuff), which will last until a full time appointment is announced. You’ll continue to see posts on NZ online media on this blog, but as I am now an insider at Fairfax, as well as Trade Me, I’ll be very circumspect in commenting about both institutions. …
92% of 2006 US ad spend went to 4 companies
Apparently Marketscape research released at the Online Publisher Forum in London, and reported on Online spin, said that 92% of the US spend in 2006 went to the “big four”: Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. In New Zealand things are very different – with MSN arriving at the party early with xtra, Google arriving very …
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Netguide and Hitwise awards – are they bunk?
Netguide are running their annual awards voting. Liv mention this in her new blog – so I’ve dragged out this partially written piece…. As Liv mentions, this year Netguide want voters to register for some dodgy website (Netguide Village – not linked) that you probably have no interest whatsoever in joining. So Netguide’s business model …
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Living Large
Olivia from Trade Me has started blogging – at Liv Large. Expect some interesting stuff as Liv has not only been at Trade Me for a long time, but she is also the person at Trade Me responsible for buying and selling advertising. There is lots of growth coming down the pipeline for online advertising …
Ferrit – 2 unsubstantiated rumours….
Last night in the pub I heard from someone, who overheard someone else saying: 1: Ferrit offered discounts to Telecom staff in the pre-Christmas period 2: Ferrit is now asking retailers to discount certain products and are picking up the tab In the style of Wonkette I’m just passing on these scurrilous rumours… but would …
Paymex paygo paypal paywhatever
The battle for payments in NZ is on. Or is it? We have a plethora of wannabe players, but nobody seems to get it. Paypal doesn’t care – after all eBay isn’t around and why support Trade Me? Pago is just woefully bureaucratically crippled, and they can’t spell Paymex looks ok, but who the heck …
Lance Wiggs 