CitiMove Part II
Brian from AdWeek who introduced me to CitiMove, the company I mentioned before in the review fraud post, also pointed me to a story written up about them in the NYTimes a few months back. You can go read an open copy of the article here. I highly recommend you do if you think about local advertising.
A little more information on the business model: they charge 50 cents for each bid that is entered by a mover, which seems quite low. A 20% cut of the final fee seems like a better model. Although it looks like transaction volume is quite nice (one of the top rated movers has more than a thousand reviews). They advertise through Google and for free through craigslist.
I’m going to try and meet up with one of the founders and if I do, I’ll post tidbits of our conversation here.
I think their move to migrate the bid outcomes on to the web and open the metrics important for future customers (while restricting the non-useful data points like their personal details) is one of the better ideas around local search and am intrigued to find out more.
Just wanted to thank you for your posts about our site. There are a lot of changes that we are planning to make to both the site design and the charging scheme but given the fact that we both work full time jobs, it’s been a bit slow going. Anyways, if you are interested in chatting with us, feel free to email Eric or me at info@citimove.com!