Classifieds Site, Edgeio Auction Beginning at $250K

edgeio, a website that was co-founded by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is selling its assets for a starting bid of about $250,000.  edgeio will be remaining operational until the auction closes and is giving updates via its wiki page.  edgeio was a classifieds web site that found itself attempting to compete among the likes of craigslist.

The assets of edgeio include the help from two of the founders in transitioning the service, the web site, the live service, the technology, and the patent and trademarks.  TechCrunch has been using it to power its job board subsidiary, CrunchJobs.

The classifieds Internet market is a tough to penetrate.  Every major portal has classifieds of some sort and each has its own niche.  craigslist and Rent.com dominates the market for real estate.  Monster.com dominates job listings.  Cars.com dominates the used car market.  It comes to no surprise that something as broad as edgeio would find itself struggling against the conglomerate niches.

At one point earlier this year, Shan and I put together a similar site called JobAcquire that had the similar functions as craigslist and looked as aesthetic as edgeio, but decided that the market was just way too saturated.  Taking these companies head-on is challenging and requires full attention.

It was a good try for edgeio.  Sometimes you just have to take on the big boys head-on to make it in the Internet world like YouTube did against Google Video and Facebook did to MySpace/Friendster.

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