Online cassifieds service Edgio has raised $5 million in a Series A financing round led by Intel Capital.
Reports can be found here, here and here. Only a short note on TechCrunch, of course - Mike Arrington runs founded edgeio after all.
Te basic tenor so far has been that edgio has come back from the dead. I wrote about the company’s service a while back and it seemed utterly useless to me. Now, with deals with Amazon and eBay, they might have a shot at being a bigger player. To do that, though, they are going to have to market outside of their niche audience of techies and bloggers. The original idea to gather the listings through tags on blogs seemed cool, but when I last looked at the site a month or two ago, the number of listings was paltry and the amount of spam and useless information meant the service was absolutely useless.
What needs to be seen now is if they can make it work. Even now, I can, for example, only find one car on sale in Portland, OR and the job listings seem to be for babysitters only.
Still, I wish them the best of luck. The online classifieds listing can use some inovation and some shaking up.
Thanks for taking the time to comment on our funding. Its especially great when former critics continue to engage in the conversation and I appreciate your candor.
On your points. edgeio has a big audacious goal - to bring together, organize and distribute the world’s marketplaces. Today we have about 100m listings but many of those are merchandise from eBay and Amazon and CafePress. About 2 million are listings from the rss feeds we have helped bring into being and these cover jobs, real estate, cars and such.
If we are successful every listing on the planet will end up in edgeio and Portland would then be well covered. However, it is a process and it will take time. All big goals tend to be that way.
So, by adding the big guys edgeio has become useful right away, but its goal is still much bigger and will only be realized in the future.
Once all 2.5m cities in our database have listings available, and each local area has a real marketplace on edgeio.com, made up of local classifieds, local business listings and national/global listings, then we will have reached our starting point.
The beauty of the approach is, it only keeps getting better as we get closer to it.
Starting now we can also begin to focus on our next stage, which is to make it easy to create a marketplace yourself and take listings from us into it (including take revenue for them like CruchBoard for example). Look out for some announcements next month. Once that is done edgeio will look more like a hub than a search destination. Listings in and listings out with many partners on each side.
Thanks for your good wishes. This is the stuff you can hold us to as we go forward. If it works then online listings will become democratized and listings fees will be a thing of the past, and most web sites will have a listings based revenue stream alongside advertising if desired.
Oh, and I guess you know this but Mike doesn’t run edgeio
Keith Teare
ceo/founder/edgeio