[ryetoasthumor]

I was the COO at AutoRef.

I am a little unclear what you mean by an advertising revenue model. There are two ways to implement this model: 1. Have dealers pay you to advertise their inventory on your site - similar to AutoTrader and traditional classified sites.

2. Run AdWords or some other advertisements on the site to earn money.

We had a true reverse auction platform where customers selected 3 identical/similar new/used vehicles and we initially pushed for a charge per car sold model (ie TrueCar). But many dealers had been turned off by TrueCar bad reputation and it's struggles with charging a similar brokering fee, so they weren't interested in AutoRef's service at all.

After that we went for a flat monthly fee but ultimately it was too little too late. So it's possible that your idea could work but we sure had a tough time implementing it.

TrueCar has always had a consistent revenue stream from its acquisition of Zag - which ran the car buying program for many car insurance company's, AAA, etc. This is a definite edge over a startup bootstrapping ad revenue.

Story about AutoRef: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used-cars...