Unseen Economy; A Retrospective Look At Shetlink Classifieds

[admin]

£41.4 million

 

No, this isn't the latest Euromillions jackpot! It's Shetlink: your everday Shetland site assisting Shetlanders buy and sell.

Since moving across to the new software Shetlink's been busy cleaning the data contained within the old classifieds section to achieve statistics. Not exactly a straightforward nor exciting job but, what Shetlink can happily announce:

The original Shetlink Shetland classifieds ran from Voar 2009 to Hairst 2013 directly assisting Shetlanders advertise c£41.4m (cleansed data for Accommodation, Motor, Boating **) of local classified items; an unseen economy! Shetlink unfortunately has no figures relating to the period up to 2009 but, members can extrapolate a guesstimate: Shetlink classifieds first started to appear c2008 within the forums before moving to custom software to contain them.

** Classifieds not counted: rental, those asking for 'offers', '+VAT', 'wanted', 'exchange', 'swap for cases of lager'!, duplicates, no value (obviously), 'sold', 'wanted', etc. The other sections have not been taken into consideration as they still require a significant amount of data cleansing.

 

 http://www.shetlink.com/index.php?/classifieds/item/8535-unseen-economy-a-retrospective-look-at-shetlink-classifieds/

[JustMe]

But do you have a way to split out "sold" from advertised again every couple of weeks?. 

[trout]

Yes, sold should be included above too.

 

The old 'price' section was free-text so anything saying 'sold' in the price section was removed - those figures aren't known and aren't in the overall figure. The 'price' input box having been free-text is why it's taken so *&"*&^$*&^ long to get to a figure that could be backed up with relevant statistics.

 

Removing duplicates has been a pain. Descriptions had to be compared against prices and shifting and sorting the exported dataset against categories/usernames/description/price to remove anything considered as a duplicate was done. All classifieds considered borderline or clearly couldn't be made sense of were removed.

 

To note also anything 'wanted' was also removed. Where stating 'offers' and variations of that ilk it had to be removed: again those figures can't be known even when stating a RRP price in the description for instance.

[shetlandpeat]

Imagine if everyone paid just 1% contribution...

[trout]

Imagine! We'd have paid top-top whack a long time ago for an uber-range server!

[trout]

So here's a thought. What's the Shetlink community's impression of having moved towards paid trade/commercial advertising in the classifieds section?
 
Had the most random and discerning PM conversation with someone yesterday who was particularly disgruntled by having to pay for the situations vacant section even though they were advertising a position in one of the UK's largest retail outlets. They accused Shetlink of greed; the irony, before stating they were going to delete their account; good luck trying that without asking for assistance.
 
Shetlink's continued interest and usage by it's community means it 'needs' to be developed further. Whilst the assistance provided by the "donation" button helps keep the show on the road it's a stretch to say that can go far enough to actually assist in upgrading/developing. I'm sure you're aware at how much downtime there is / has been - the week long f*kup at the start of Nov being completely out with our control! Without the new framework the entire system would also, for instance, be a flood of kitchenspam as it was with poor moderators running around aimlessly trying to delete it - no fun for anyone.

 

Anyway, as always, happy to hear everyone's thoughts.

[MuckleJoannie]

As the owner of a small business I wouldn't object to paying to advertise.

[shetlandpeat]

Would the charges extend to charities looking for staff or volunteers?

[trout]

Any charities looking to advertise can certainly contact Shetlink and they would receive a personalised service.

[owre-weel]

 

Had the most random and discerning PM conversation with someone yesterday who was particularly disgruntled by having to pay for the situations vacant section even though they were advertising a position in one of the UK's largest retail outlets. They accused Shetlink of greed; the irony, before stating they were going to delete their account; good luck trying that without asking for assistance.

 .

Noo why du's dat no surprise me, dey lik to roughshot though any other interests which dey tink should bow tae der superiority. Glad tae see du's stuck tae de guns.

 

I think its reasonable to make a charge for commercial advertising, but please keep in mind there are many " small " one man/woman businesses, (many who sneak the odd advert on here) who could not afford to pay too much. I have found a few folk I needed to do small jobs on Shetlink and they have all said due to the small size of their business they can't afford the type of charges being made on other sites.

 

As for recruitment ads, these should definitely be charged for.

 

Looking at the growing classified ads placed each day, which I love looking through, I often wonder how many folk give a donation after a successful sale? A 20p charge would be a drop in the ocean to the sellers, but would have generated a reasonable sum for server upgrades

[Barneys7]

i disagree with the selling of guns on this web site any one of any age could be buying them if you disagree with me let the advert stay if not would you delete please

[trout]

^^ Yes, 'guns' were always removed - then there were the days of free-for-all. Shetlink is merely a conduit. Selling firearms and or shotguns with the correct certification and storage facilities in itself is not an illegal activity; if you suspect an illegal sale is taking place you would be best to notify the police. Illegal activities on Shetlink are absolutely not allowed as detailed in the T&C's of Shetlink.

 

Thanks owre-weel, yes, it's a funny 'ol world. Those people that have actually donated know who they are. Thank you to them! Your kind understanding and altruistic assistance has definitely been a mainstay in keeping the show on the road.

 

The pricing structure has effectively been introduced and initially was set to curtail the outright abuse by commercial businesses in Shetland using the classifieds section to sell goods and definitely not donating. Through discussion with smaller business holders it was decided to lower this in conjunction with the £41.4m news so as not to marginalise them. It's a very fine line.

 

Any good news stories or other are also welcomed.

[Aaron Foord]

Just an observation really - when using search you have to search for 4 or more letters in a single word. For instance, today I wanted to look to see if anyone had any Sky TV boxes for sale. It would not let me search for 'SKY' and told me to use more than 3 letters, so I tried 'SKY BOX' and got the same result. Can this search be amended?

[trout]

Altered to three 3 characters. See how it goes with performance and superfluous results.

[Bert]

As far as the Trade ads go I can understand if you want to charge to have your ad appear in the header which will promote it more but I think you could have it free in the Trade section aswell. i was pleased to see you reduced the price of Trade ads i hope this is permanent and I hope you would consider reducing it even further

 

With the classified ads I think 2 weeks is too long to wait before you can renew it I think a week would be long enough, alot of people in Shetland are using the Facebook classifieds pages and you can renew them after 3 days on there and all the ads including the Trade ones are all free

 

Other than that its pretty good