This blog is about UList which is a free New Zealand Online Classifieds website. As the creator of UList, I would like to find out what do people think about UList.
There are quite a few free and paid classified and auction websites in New Zealand at the moment. I personally think that the time of paid classified sites has to come to an end because in this day and age there are plenty of ways to make profit from running a website without actually charging the customer one cent. Most obvious way to make a profit is to include advertisements on ones site.
A well working classified and auction website such as trademe can be offered to New Zealanders for free and still be a profitable business for the website owner. The difference is that while trademe fuels large corporation with mega profits of milions of dollars, a free equivalent website would bring much less profit, but in the end serve the public just as well. This is the case of a free classified website in USA craigslist which is quite popular in that country.
Running a website does consume resources and in the end if a site does not become popular within a set amount of time it will most likely be discontinued. I will continue to run UList as long as I see any potential of it becoming popular even few years from now. Social trends are difficult to predict and even harder to change. If we could today have a free trademe and it was as popular as the current paid trademe, there is no question that everyone would prefer this hypothetical situation. So how can New Zealand have a useful and effective free classified website? I don’t know, but this would be a good thesis for a PHD research of social studies.
UList is as much of a business venture as it is a social experiment. Are we ready to embrace a change?