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I was the COO at AutoRef. I am a little unclear what you mean by an advertising revenue model. There are two ways to implement this model: 1. Have dealers pay
by ryetoasthumor 13y ago
I was the COO at AutoRef.
I am a little unclear what you mean by an advertising revenue model. There are two ways to implement this model:
1. Have dealers pay you to advertise their inventory on your site - similar to AutoTrader and traditional classified sites.
2. Run AdWords or some other advertisements on the site to earn money.
We had a true reverse auction platform where customers selected 3 identical/similar new/used vehicles and we initially pushed for a charge per car sold model (ie TrueCar). But many dealers had been turned off by TrueCar bad reputation and it's struggles with charging a similar brokering fee, so they weren't interested in AutoRef's service at all.
After that we went for a flat monthly fee but ultimately it was too little too late. So it's possible that your idea could work but we sure had a tough time implementing it.
TrueCar has always had a consistent revenue stream from its acquisition of Zag - which ran the car buying program for many car insurance company's, AAA, etc. This is a definite edge over a startup bootstrapping ad revenue.
Story about AutoRef: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used-cars-autoref-raises-850k-seed-round-led-by-european-car-buying-marketplace-autoscout24/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used-cars...