Are you in need of a Santa Claus suit, a women’s self defence class or a naked
man to clean your house? Neither am I. But somehow, when your internet
browser alights on gumtree.com in search
of a babysitter or piano teacher, it is impossible not to peek further into
this labyrinth of random classified advertisements.
It is addictive. An earnest young man offers £5 a bucket for garden snails.
Why? “I intend to make her a lovely soup, and as this is my first girlfriend
I want everything to go well.” Another irresistible offer: a free can of
beer. Brand unspecified. The owner divulges: “i dont need it any more as i
am p***** now.”
Looking for a cleaner? There are the regular kind who wear jeans and use up
the Flash wipes, or a chap offering to don a frilly pinny and scrub the
floors in return for light bossing from the lady of the house.
Take comfort, as another hour slips by and you wonder whether or not to sign
up for a paranormal investigation evening at a Perthshire castle, in knowing
that you are not alone. Gumtree’s Scottish sites — in Glasgow, Edinburgh,
Aberdeen, Dundee and Inverness — are registering some of the highest growth
rates in the UK. Glasgow more than doubled its site traffic last year, while
Edinburgh saw an increase of 72%. On the capital’s site, the busiest in
Scotland, 25,000 new advertisements are posted each month.
Gumtree was born in 2000. Having been backpackers in their own salad days,
London-based bankers Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall observed the
shivering, shorts-wearing Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans who
swarm around London and saw a fortune to be made. They needed flats, cars,
jobs, friends. On Gumtree — the name was chosen because it is indigenous to
all three countries — they could find everything they needed for free.
Unlike other websites from those febrile days, Gumtree was not financed with
piles of venture capitalists’ money and adorned with elaborate graphics and
dancing banner advertisements. It was as functional and therefore as cheap
to set up and administer, as a free newspaper. This allowed it to expand
when so many other dotcom ventures, set up by similarly bold young men,
turned to dust.
Eight years on and it is thriving. To the naked eye, it has changed little
from its initial, ramshackle, incarnation. The logo has been neatened up,
the site runs more smoothly. But although most users pay nothing to
advertise their bin bags of baby clothes and urgent desire for adult company
on a Tuesday afternoon, this is big business.
In 2003, Gumtree started charging £20 for certain job ads and transformed
itself into a financially viable proposition. In 2005, it was bought by
internet auction site eBay for an undisclosed sum.
At the website’s London HQ, where they look after the separate sites for 40
English cities, as well as Cardiff, Swansea, Belfast, Cork and Dublin, the
official line is to differentiate between Gumtree and its parent company
whenever possible, stressing its local structure at every turn. “Gumtree is
a community noticeboard,” says a spokesman.
“eBay is a marketplace. We are non-transactional.”
What this means to those who seek a room in a flat, a genuine cat-loving chick
or a dog-hating Mr Universe, is that finding the desired item or person is
just the first step. Unlike eBay, where it is possible to complete the
entire transaction with mouse and credit card, Gumtree requires tenants,
landlords, buyers, sellers, finders and seekers to meet each other and take
it from there. The site’s administrators present this as a good thing, as if
discussions of deposits and blind dates in dingy music venues were the
building blocks of a thriving, coherent, real-life community rather than a
bunch of random people looking for a roof over their head and someone to
share it with.
Gumtree is also, they say proudly, “self-moderating”. This means that adverts,
and contributions to the site’s forums, are not checked before they appear.
The theory is that Gumtree users are a vigilant bunch who will clype on
scammers, rule-breakers, pornographers and other undesirables by using a
“report this ad” button that appears on each listing. Users should, they
say, be cautious, read up on the various scams that are doing the rounds,
heed the many warnings dotted around the site. (Be an aware buyer! If
something is too good to be true, it probably is!)
As the busiest category on Gumtree is property, it is not surprising that the
highest number of complaints are about unscrupulous landlords. There are
also numerous scams, outlined in the forums, based upon overpayment for
goods, cheques that are then cancelled and monies to be transferred using a
wiring service. Often a Nigerian wants to buy your wheeled suitcase,
advertised for £15, and send £200 to cover the shipping costs. You will then
refund them the difference, only to discover they have cancelled the
original cheque.
The site’s motto would be “caveat emptor”, if only its users understood Latin.
Gumtree’s most notorious region, the casual relationships adverts in the
friends/dating category, is less prone to abuse because here, advertisers
are straightforward to the point of unnecessary bluntness. “Ladies wanted
for discrete [sic] sex”, pleads a bored 28-year-old in Tayside whose partner
works away a lot. “I wanna be the ham in your sandwich” offers a 22-year-old
brunette from Kilmarnock. And there is more. Much, much, much more. All you
need is a free Thursday morning, a rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet
soup of online dating and there is a bbw (big beautiful woman) ready to have
nsa (no strings attached) fun.
This does not surprise cyberpsychologist Dr Monica Whitty, who says that
people have been using bulletin boards to arrange casual encounters since
the internet began. For her, Gumtree, where you can look for a partner and a
car on the same website, is attractive because it makes less of a statement
than signing up for a dedicated internet dating site. “It’s less formal, so
it feels more natural. You do not have to specify a big shopping list of
your likes and dislikes.”
Is Gumtree the community it purports to be? It is, says Whitty, in the site’s
interests to put it that way. “People are more likely to trust what they
find there. I’m not surprised they try to promote that, to instill trust in
their users. It gives them a shared identity, makes them stakeholders. And
it must be serving some needs, or people would not be using it in such great
numbers.”
And it is the anonymity of this online community that gives its members the
licence to offer to clean my lavatories as nature intended. “Of course it
affects people,” she says. “They behave in ways they would never do
off-line.”
