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EcoFlip offers free classified ads and personals for the sustainable set.
We’ve seen various takes on the MySpace of green and the Digg of green. The business models of social media invariably lend themselves to niche applications, and Craig’s List is no exception.
Craig’s List is one of those indispensable resources that transcends its basic role as online classified ads and becomes something much more substantial, serving to build and bind communities. The founders of EcoFlip are hoping to bottle some of that lightning for green communities the world over.
The simple classified ad format and interface is immediately familiar and easy to use. The listings are organized by country, state, and city with an eye to nurturing local green communities. Though EcoFlip has only been live for a couple months, there is a surprising number of listings already.
Categories include Green Living, Household Products, EcoPersonals, Reuse and Recycle, Fuel-Efficient Vehicles, Eco-Friendly Services, and Sustainable Community.
The listings are free, though co-founder Forrest Kolb explains that they are experimenting with a donation model and a suggestion of $5 per ad. The Featured Ads section, where Max Gladwell is listed, carry a suggested donation of $49. Kolb compares it to several yoga studios that work on a pure donation basis. We’ve gone to Brian Kest’s Power Yoga for years, and the classes for this yoga empire are pure donation. Thought Kest often emphasizes that “donation” does not mean “free”. It’s clear you are expected to pay something, and they suggest the dollar amount.
So it’s an interesting approach for EcoFlip, especially considering our post on Your Subscription to the Social Web, which amounts to a central subscription hub that would be entirely voluntary. Salon also just launched a blogger tipping system along these same lines:
Members of its “Open Salon” user-generated content community can now “tip” one another with real-world money if they like what they see. Salon’s micropayments are handled through technology from Revolution MoneyExchange.
Plenty of sites have instituted virtual reputation gauges (i.e. Yelp‘s “compliments”) and a handful of amateur-content-driven media sites like GroundReport give their contributors a cut of ad revenue, but having members compensate one another is a pretty novel concept.
It’s encouraging to see companies experimenting with these different types of revenue streams, as either suplements or alternatives to advertising. It runs counter to human nature, so there probably needs to be some other mechanism to encourage participation, such as an indication that you’ve opted to make the donation.
Note: EcoFlip blogged about our unique approach to branding.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Meryn Stol // Aug 12, 2008 at 5:08 am
“It runs counter to human nature,”
You can’t make this claim like that. There’s no real definition of human nature, even experts disagree on what it is. The lay-man experience of human nature is certainly very subjective, and highly cultural dependent.
“there probably needs to be some other mechanism to encourage participation, such as an indication that you’ve opted to make the donation.”
You should look into http://tipjoy.com/ !
2 green blog // Aug 12, 2008 at 7:20 am
In fact, when we look at it, there are actually a lot of channels, which we can get the “green” message across whether it is online or even offline. And of course I’m excited to see this latest development.
3 Max Gladwell // Aug 12, 2008 at 10:34 am
Meryn: I can list many things are definitively human nature. The survival instinct is human nature. So there’s a starting point.
There are many behavioral attributes about the human species that are simply hard coded. Some of these are shared by other species. Egocentrism is one of them. It’s natural to look out for #1.
Other aspects of human nature are proven through repeated social experiments, and there’s a reason why economics is the most successful and reliable of all social sciences. Offer a rational person the choice between $1 and $100, and (all else being equal) they’ll choose $100 every time. It stands to reason, then, that offering someone the choice between paying $0 and $5, the rational person will choose the former. Unless there is some other force at work to influence them to choose the latter. This force could be guilt, social reinforcement, or a good feeling for having chosen to be generous.
So we’re not saying that generosity is NOT human nature. That’s a different argument altogether. We’re simply saying that humans are rational beings and that rationality dictates that, all else being equal, you make the rational choice 100% of the time. It’s our nature.
4 Meryn Stol // Aug 12, 2008 at 11:35 am
Ever heard of group selection?
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