Where are Classifieds heading?
Where will newspaper Classifieds be in another few years, and where do they need to be?
Steve Outing has a new initiative around this called Reinventing Classifieds, which is collecting information using an online survey. If there are other research projects out there like this, such as the incredibly insightful Classified Intelligence, I would be interested to know about it and will gladly write about it on my blog if I find it of interest. The more information in this space, the merrier!
I took the survey and look forward to seeing the aggregate answers, which you can only get if you take it. Outing promises me that all answers will be kept confidential and only reported with names removed. But if you're one of the many people in this industry who can't provide financial information about your company, know that you're also free to keep those fields blank. That's what I did.
Here's what I posted in the survey comment fields, none of which should be new if you know where I stand.
Newspapers' classified businesses are obviously challenged, but only because the marketplace is now much bigger than general-interest news products that revolve around print. People have many, many more choices than newspapers these days. The marketplace is much bigger than it was a decade ago, a fact which Classified aggregator Oodle is happy to tout.
Will consumers continue to pay for Classified advertisements? Sure, but maybe not in the way they do today. I see the model moving from one based on paying to publish to paying for targeted promotion. Publishing information online has been free for several years now, but if you look at the billions Google is raking in with keyword sales you can see that there's a LOT of money to be made promoting free and cheap content. On the same note, paying for upsells that make your ad stand out in a sea of information is also valuable (and is also Google's core business).
Ultimately people don't really care about the medium in which their ad appears, but they do care about how effective the ad is at attracting exactly the right person at the right time. Targeting saves them time, and for commercial merchandise may also result in a higher personal profit margin. If you can do a better job matching local buyers and sellers than any of your competitors, you will create value that will translate into dollars.
I also think it's useful to put Classifieds in the larger context of user-generated content, which in my opinion is really what Classifieds are.
In our market we see user-generated content making up most of the growth of our Web sites, but it's still hard to monetize that traffic. By positioning Classifieds as a way of telling stories about your stuff (the "Antiques Roadshow" approach) and promoting them with user content -- and vice versa -- I hope that we'll see the same kind of growth with ads that we've seen with blogs and user profiles. We've spent a lot of time lately building a solution that gives people the tools and space to tell really compelling stories, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry.
I also suspect that we need to stop positioning ad placement in terms of "online-only" and "print + web." Unfortunately the current choices from Classified vendors makes that difficult. What's really needed is an integrated solution that lets users place an ad, choose upsells and then choose where they want the ad to appear.
Looking into my crystal ball (and this is pure conjecture on my part and my own personal opinion), I expect that consumers will soon see a print product as just one of many promotional upsells. Some people will pay to have their ads promoted in various print products that match their target interests and demographics, while others may pay for carriage in completely different products -- such as Craigslist (why not?)
That's a really different way to think about Classifieds, but the reality is that newspapers don't get to decide how consumers view Classifieds anymore. There's a whole other world of choices out there. We can be one of those choices, and we must be in order to remain relevant in the Classifieds space.
Technorati Tags:
classifieds, 
newspaper classifieds
Steve Outing has a new initiative around this called Reinventing Classifieds, which is collecting information using an online survey. If there are other research projects out there like this, such as the incredibly insightful Classified Intelligence, I would be interested to know about it and will gladly write about it on my blog if I find it of interest. The more information in this space, the merrier!
I took the survey and look forward to seeing the aggregate answers, which you can only get if you take it. Outing promises me that all answers will be kept confidential and only reported with names removed. But if you're one of the many people in this industry who can't provide financial information about your company, know that you're also free to keep those fields blank. That's what I did.
Here's what I posted in the survey comment fields, none of which should be new if you know where I stand.
Newspapers' classified businesses are obviously challenged, but only because the marketplace is now much bigger than general-interest news products that revolve around print. People have many, many more choices than newspapers these days. The marketplace is much bigger than it was a decade ago, a fact which Classified aggregator Oodle is happy to tout.
Will consumers continue to pay for Classified advertisements? Sure, but maybe not in the way they do today. I see the model moving from one based on paying to publish to paying for targeted promotion. Publishing information online has been free for several years now, but if you look at the billions Google is raking in with keyword sales you can see that there's a LOT of money to be made promoting free and cheap content. On the same note, paying for upsells that make your ad stand out in a sea of information is also valuable (and is also Google's core business).
Ultimately people don't really care about the medium in which their ad appears, but they do care about how effective the ad is at attracting exactly the right person at the right time. Targeting saves them time, and for commercial merchandise may also result in a higher personal profit margin. If you can do a better job matching local buyers and sellers than any of your competitors, you will create value that will translate into dollars.
I also think it's useful to put Classifieds in the larger context of user-generated content, which in my opinion is really what Classifieds are.
In our market we see user-generated content making up most of the growth of our Web sites, but it's still hard to monetize that traffic. By positioning Classifieds as a way of telling stories about your stuff (the "Antiques Roadshow" approach) and promoting them with user content -- and vice versa -- I hope that we'll see the same kind of growth with ads that we've seen with blogs and user profiles. We've spent a lot of time lately building a solution that gives people the tools and space to tell really compelling stories, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry.
I also suspect that we need to stop positioning ad placement in terms of "online-only" and "print + web." Unfortunately the current choices from Classified vendors makes that difficult. What's really needed is an integrated solution that lets users place an ad, choose upsells and then choose where they want the ad to appear.
Looking into my crystal ball (and this is pure conjecture on my part and my own personal opinion), I expect that consumers will soon see a print product as just one of many promotional upsells. Some people will pay to have their ads promoted in various print products that match their target interests and demographics, while others may pay for carriage in completely different products -- such as Craigslist (why not?)
That's a really different way to think about Classifieds, but the reality is that newspapers don't get to decide how consumers view Classifieds anymore. There's a whole other world of choices out there. We can be one of those choices, and we must be in order to remain relevant in the Classifieds space.
Technorati Tags:
classifieds, newspaper classifiedsLabels: classifids, newspapers
posted by Dan at
3/06/2008 01:06:00 PM
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