The Australian Newsagents’ Federation wrote to newsagents Friday night to clarify their support for the ozjobfindit free employment classified offering. Unfortunately they created more problems for themselves and further confused newsagents. They have not explained why they are promoting the “johnny come lately” ozjobfindit while ignoring our Find It online classifieds model for the last eight to ten weeks.
The ANF statement Friday suggests that Ozjobfindit has been in development for over a year. The reality is that they registered their domain name three weeks ago in the United States. Given our registration here of www.findit.com.au we suspect a registration of such a similar name would have failed. A check of the site suggests this is a quickly thrown together site without a content acquisition plan.
The ANF statement also says that Ozjobfindit Pty Limited is a company registered in Victoria. No such company is currently registered according to ASIC.
More than 1,000 newsagents have got behind the Find It brand and the soon to publicly launch free online classifieds website. That their one national association is part of an online model which confuses other newsagents and consumers is disappointing. One has to wonder about their motivation. One also has to wonder about the quality of due diligence when you consider the lack of company registration and confusion over actual ownership of what the ANF is promoting.
Newsagents are the losers in this. The association ought to spend its time representing newsagents on more important matters rather than trying to harm my Find It initiative for newsagents.