Pete Flint

Great question. Jcheng, I was in a call this morning that talked about this, the link to it is here:

http://www.truliablog.com/2008/09/25/notes-from-trulias-indu…

Overall, I think the bailout will be good news for the economy and buyers and sellers, but it's bumpy ride. Listen to the audio file for some great comments from the panelists. - Thu Sep 25 2008, 18:22

Hi Rob,
We did address the issues in the blog post you mentioned earlier today in lots of detail to clear up the concerns some users had.
Below is the link. You should subscribe to our blog!
Hope this helps clarify our perspective on these things.
Best
Pete - Thu May 1 2008, 23:09

Mark,
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure of the exact implementation, but we are definitely working on ways to help generate more visibility to the most active Trulia Voices contributors. In the meantime, the more you contribute, the more links to your profile you will get and that will help your search rankings in google.
Pete - Wed Feb 6 2008, 12:06

Hi this is Pete from Trulia.
This is an interesting question and I’m intrigued by the answers.

The reason that we put nofollow tags in the links on the answers it to thwart the attempts of spammers. This is in fact the origins of the nofollow tag and we do carefully monitor this site for spam, that way we can deliver a great experience for consumers and agents. You can read more about the origins of nofollow here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow and here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp… . Including the nofollow tag on links is standard practice on almost all large user generated content sites (such as Wikipedia) and also on blog platforms as you can see from the google blog post.

However, we do understand that links and google juice are important to many agents and consequently we do remove the nofollow tags on links from the profile pages to give agents extra link juice. Because every answer you give has a link to the profile from all over Trulia.com, make sure you link to your blog from your profile and share as much information about yourself. Mack who asked this question, has done a great job here with these links and link text.

On the questions about our business model. Trulia Voices is free and we have no intention to change that, we do hear from many agents that they are getting new business Trulia Voices at no cost, other than their time – which is great to hear. We do provide optional premium advertising services, which we think are really great value for money and of course hope that agents and brokers purchase these, but they are completely optional.

Keep the comments and suggestions coming. We really value them and are always listening.

Pete

PS. Is no one watching the build up to superbowl!?? - Sun Feb 3 2008, 14:26

Happy New Year to everyone on Trulia Voices from all the Trulia employees.
You (the entire Trulia Voices community) all helped to make 2007 a very special year for us here and together I'm sure we're all going to make 2008 a great year!

Some New Year's resolutions over at our company blog below.

Pete from Trulia.com - Mon Dec 31 2007, 17:59

Hi Victor,
This is Pete from Trulia
Interesting to read your analysis on the business model.

You're right, we are making a loss today, but as a new company we're investing in growth, by hiring smart engineers and product teams to build a useful search engine, community services like Trulia Voices and advertising products.
While I'm not able to break down the specific numbers, we're really delighted with our progress and have growing our visitor numbers by double digits on average every month for at least the last 12 months and our revenues have been growing even faster than visits to the sites. As you highlight, we're a media website that makes money from advertising and it is working pretty well and we will be profitable in the future with this model as we invest some of the $18m of venture capital we have raised to build a great website. It is these growth rates in visitors and even faster growth in revenues that will help turn the red ink into the black ink in the future.

We're very confident and excited here at trulia about our prospects as a company.

Pete - Tue Dec 4 2007, 21:01