selling your home online

Yesterday the Arizona Daily Star online had an article titled
Selling home online can net a hefty gain. The author, Marshall Loeb, tells us ' Despite the recent housing market slump, many Americans are still paying a walloping 6 percent commission to real estate brokers'. He gets it wrong right out of the gate. It's not despite the recent housing market slump that many Americans are paying a walloping 6 percent - if anything, the slump has caused people to continue to use proven methods to try and sell their home & not experiment with methods that have been much less reliable, even in the best of times.
When many thousands of homes are listed for sale on MLS's all across the country, and sitting on the market for months, most home sellers would not choose to drastically reduce the amount of exposure that their home is getting to potential buyers on the chance that they may save a couple of percent in commission.
He then states that Many homeowners are now opting to market their property directly to the consumer using online services like Yahoo Real Estate and Craigslist. And he ties that in with- 80% of those searching for a home use the internet. Leaving you with the impression that it's simple to sell your home on the internet by using Yahoo and Craigslist, because, 80% of the home searches are being conducted on the internet, on sites like Yahoo and Craigslist.
In fact the great majority of the searches of those 80% searching online are doing so on real estate brokerage web sites and MLS's, not on Yahoo or Craigslist. Because those real estate brokerages and MLS's have made all their listings available for people to search on the internet. Yahoo and Craigslist are great sites, but they contain just a teeny tiny fraction of the homes for sale. 
Then, ' Six percent may not sound like much, but consider: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average price of a home is $313,000, which means the average seller has to pony up nearly $19,000 in broker fees. This is a hefty penalty for not selling your own home, one that more and more Americans are unwilling to pay'.
Mr. Loeb consistently uses 6 percent as the amount of commission charged by real estate brokers, leading you to believe - intentionally it seems since I'm sure he knows otherwise- that it's 6 percent, like it or not, with no choice for the consumer. 
In fact there is a whole range of choices in the services offered by various real estate brokerages and the cost of those services, just like in every other industry and business in this country.
But it's a very convenient omission on Loeb's part, since it allows him to tell the story the way he wants, without being hindered by the facts. And again simplifying beyond belief, the $19,000 savings is offered as a given, with no mention of the possible trade-offs involved, or the fact that this $19,000 savings assumes that the buyers are also not represented by an agent, hence no commission.
A very unlikely scenario.
And whether the commission is 6, 5 or 4 percent, or whatever it is, it's not a penalty, it's a fee that's paid for services rendered.
And the fee is only paid if the home sells. No sale, no fee.
In that same vein of characterizing a fee for services as a penalty, would it be correct to consider the cost of an ad in the Arizona Daily Star (which you pay for whether or not it works), or, the cost of a subscription to the Star, to be a penalty.
We can choose, and increasingly many of us do, to sell our cars, used furniture and other stuff on the internet for free, and not put an ad in the Star. And we can read the news all day long on the internet for free. Why pay a penalty to the Star to subsidize these fairy tales.
Then Mr Loeb talks with Colby Sambrotto, chief operating officer of ForSaleByOwner.com, a leading online home marketplace, who says
(surprise-surprise) "Selling your home online is simpler than you might think", and then goes on to list the three simple steps to sell your home online and on your own, and how to accomplish each of them. (For the details read the article HERE)
1. Find out what your home is worth
2. Market your property
and, 3. Transfer the title
That's it, it's childs play, easy as 1,2,3.
This article would be laughable really and it's hard to believe that anyone would take it seriously, nevertheless, the glaring omissions and blatant oversimplification misinform and mislead on a subject that's important to me and to lots of other people.