It's always the same: inadequate content.
Compare any prospective site to the sites already listed.
Not the worst ones, of course -- they probably shouldn't be listed either, and probably wouldn't be if they were created in the second millenium of the internet. (Maybe five years ago they looked good, or at any rate as good as anything available.
No, compare a prospective site to the three-five BEST sites -- the sites in that category, and the sites in the PARENT category that have the best content in their own classifications corresponding to that category. If you don't have substantial content they don't have -- or that they wouldn't have if you didn't exist -- then everyone on earth -- both surfers and advertisers -- is better off without knowing about your site.
But it's worse than that.
Obviously, users would do best to start with those sites, and work their way down to the smallest and least comprehensive. So really, you have to ask: what are the chances that a surfer would FAIL to find what they seek at ALL the bigger sites, and then SUCCESSFULLY find it at my site? If the answer is "negligable", then again, surfers are better off without the site. And even if the answer is "tiny but perhaps non-negligable", the question becomes, "but how likely are surfers to persist long enough to get to that site?"
There is a LOT of competition, and there are many sites that have established themselves by building communities, niches, sources of content -- sites that have not done all that already are not ready for prime time, and therefore not ready for the ODP.
I haven't looked at your site -- but I know that this answer applies to 99% of all the submitted sites in "classified ads" categories, and probably 75% of the sites LISTED in those categories. We made mistakes, we let our quality guard down way too far. It's correction time.
That's the reality we (as indexers) and you (as content creator) have to deal with. A listing in the ODP simply will not jump-start a site in a crowded category, dependent on visitors for its content. Our reaction -- and it is the only rational one -- is not to list such sites: they are bad for our reputation, harmful to advertisers, confusing for surfers. Your reaction must be to develop a stream of content anterior to general site promotion -- anything else is futile at best and probably harmful to your reputation to boot.
As you can see, MY reaction is to cooperate with the best content-aggregating sites, so that the content I contribute benefits from their internal indexes, their prior comprehensiveness, their reputation. And I can contribute something on top. I think that motivation drives a lot of ODP editors.
Because starting something unique and worthwhile from scratch is hard. Fortunately, what one public-spirited person starts, ten thousand public-spirited people can contribute to. People are better off with MLS than a million real estate hucksters; better off with the ODP than with a hundred thousand separate overlapping link farms; better off with Project Gutenberg than with ten thousand separate e-text sites; better off with Abebooks than a thousand separate bookstores -- and doesn't the same principle apply even to classified ads-sites? And we're here to make things better for people.
