over the established auction and classified ad sites. As Marsella says, it’s like having 280 branch offices right out of the gate. Despite perceptions to the contrary, Marsella says, newspapers are not dead. “They are still extremely powerful, especially in local markets,” he says. “The one thing that newspapers do, extremely well, better than anyone, is promote in local marketplaces. And that’s a key to the system that we’ve put together.”
In case you don’t know the history of the newspaper business, here it is in a few sentences. Newspapers, from their inception, have risen and fallen primarily according revenue generated by ads or circulation. Classified ad revenues hit their high-water mark in 2000 at $19 billion nationally, according to Marsella. By 2009, that number had shrunk to $6.2 billion, as classified ad buyers defected to free services like Craigslist or to targeted online ad services.
“So, rather than continue to try to revive classified advertising as such, we thought that it was high time that the newspaper industry put its muscle back into the business, and this time go after actual transactional revenue,” Marsella says.
The company’s reach into hyperlocal newspaper markets gives it an advantage over large online auction sites like eBay, he believes. Being promoted by the “longstanding, credible, trustworthy” local media, Marsella says, gives Boocoo easier access to local advertisers like service providers. “The folks that do housepainting, and carpetlaying, and landscaping, and carpentry work, and so forth,” he says, “those are the ones that always appear in the newspaper pages’ service directory.”
With a lot of people out of work these days, there are a great many independent contractors looking to sell their services. A homeowner, for example, can use Boocoo to put out a request for proposals on a house-painting job, so that contractors can bid on it. Marsella says that eBay just does not have the kind of local reach that Boocoo does.
But what about Craigslist? How do you compete with free?
For the answer to that one, Marsella suggests you Google “Craigslist complaints” and see what comes up.
“I like to put it this way: You could leave your 14-year-old daughter in a room on the newspaper website and the Boocoo website and leave for two hours and have nothing to be afraid of,” Marsella says. “Can you leave them in the room with Craigslist and have nothing to be afraid of?”
CEO Willard says that he’s realistic about the prospects of catching up with the big guys.
“If we do 1 percent of what eBay does this year, we’ll consider that a success,” Willard says.
He is quite optimistic, though, that Boocoo will succeed in bringing some revenue back to his old profession. “Newspapers,” Willard says, “are what I know.”
