Bill,

While I am sure many appreciate your efforts, since BobD has made such as issue of contracts, lets take a look at the one you broke by e-mailing people from Tim's want ads...

Bold Print: "These ads are intended for private sellers only, not for other aircraft dealers, Brokers, Resellers or Commercial vendors!"

Your site likely falls into the broker or reseller category. So you likely violated Tim's terms of service. Sorry, but true.

2C


I am the developer of Glidersource.com



I started working on this platform about two years ago at the urging of some others. We saw the W&W ad pages (10 pages of unsorted, center-justified, one photo, limited info ads), and other classified sites at the time as something that could be vastly improved upon.



Paul Remde of Cumulus Soaring, Inc., provided moral support (but no other affiliation) and replaced his own manually-operated classified effort with links to GliderSource.com.



In the early days, I (regretfully) wrote to some of the folks advertising their aircraft there to let them know of an ADDITIONAL source to list, that would allow more text, more photos, embedded video, contact feature, hit counter, search capabilities, 24/7 self-post & edit, and other modern web goodies.

I got a lot of thank you's and ONE objection, in Sept of '11.



I've never "scrapped" ads of of his site, and I can't speak about any accusations that anyone else has either. The worst I did was send some sellers a single email. Considering the email traffic these days, it seemed pretty harmless.



Tim responded by creating or enforcing his W&W-Only policy (as mentioned, it's still not possible to tell he has such a policy without testing the waters).

Tim emailed the folks who posted their ad in both places and, well, let them know that they won't be in two places any more. Tim did not contact me, but when a dozen sailplanes fell off my site in one day and I made inquiries why, it didn't take long for someone to forward me the email that Tim sent to him. At that I stopped the direct-email campaign and apologized, including to Tim.



I contacted Tim hoping we soaring-community folks could all "play nice" together, and even offered to do some web programming to help his site be more user and owner friendly. ( Tim told me he spends "hundreds of hours" on his classified ads. That's because he gets the photos by email, has to crop and resize, create the copy, post in a web page and manually do all this work rotating his 10 or more classified ad pages around. All that is automatic on my site.) Tim declined the offer.



Tim obviously has a vested interest in keeping his want ads as THE go-to place, as the classified site is at the doorstep to his store. That's fine, how could anyone object to that? I think what people object to is that the free market is not part of that plan, since his advertisers are constrained from posting on places Tim doesn't like. Ever heard of a newspaper the won't let you advertise on craigslist too?



I've had more than one person tell me first hand that when posting an glider ad on W&W Tim delayed posting the ad a few days while offering the seller less himself. Now, I can't swear that happened, because it didn't happen to me directly, but why would someone make that up?



My interest was to for there to be a classified ad site that was highly functional, easy to use, and that users could post ANYTHING soaring related. Last I checked W&W was aircraft and parts only. As of today GliderSource.com has 38 ads for instruments, 7 for soaring equipment, and a smattering in other categories, including sailplanes and motorgliders, and 9 wanted ads.



Knowing of Tim's policy, I felt it fair to advise my potential advertisers, before they go to the effort to create an ad only to have it shot down by T.M. So, without mentioning W&W, since that might seem like I was talking bad about it, I have the following notice on my home page:

- - - - -

What if I already have my item listed on another site?



Successful advertisers across many industries place their ads in many places, not just one. All soaring related ads are welcome here. But, a prominent glider classified provider does not appreciate this effort for glider and motorglider ads. Check with your current ad carrier to see if he requires exclusive handling of your ad. I think competition improves the market. What do you think?

- - - -



I'm still hoping that Tim will make the W&W ads easier to use (fewer pages, allow more info, more photos photos, sorted, search function, etc.) because he does have more sailplane ads than anywhere else. But it seems to me that as long as he's the 800 pound gorilla in the room, he doesn't feel he needs to improve his website to compete. (remember, I even offered to help him do it - I obviously have the software skills to do so).





In conclusion, it's hard to argue with Liam's posting:

"Who will corner the market for hosting free ads serving a dwindling niche

market, in the process capturing literally hundreds of page views per

month? As Sayre's law says, the conflict is bitter only because the

stakes are so small."