Classifieds
Posted on September 18, 2006
Filed Under Advertising/Marketing, Commercial Trends |
Craig Newmark who is due to talk at the Amsterdam cross-media Picnic next week describes classifieds as content like any other, providing an engaging experience for users.
That is leading some observers to speculate that newspapers will have to use their classifieds to attract users to whom they can then pitch banner and sidebar ads.
Yes, it’s perverse. Here’s Paid Content:
“Sites with classified ads recorded 47 percent more uniques in July 2006 than in the previous year, according to stats from comScore. Half of that increase was attributed to Craigslist alone which saw a 99 percent increase to 13.8 million…. obviously bad news for newspapers which generate about 40 percent of revenue from classifieds, but can’t compete with the Craigslist free-ad model.”
Of course Craig’s List is not all free. Professional companies have to pay, though they pay little. And individual advertisers can feel drowned in all that gunge - there was recently a prostitute’s ring exposed (please no puns) on Craig’s List, not for the first time.
So surely the way to attack this space is not to go free - free invites trouble but to go cheap and to provide a safer environment than Craig. Cheap though would still compromise many newspaper business models but new initiatives could live with it!
technorati tags:newspapers, classified ads, web, 2.0
Comments
One Response to “Classifieds”
Leave a Reply
Khichdee is a famous Indian delicacy, containing a combination of various pulses, spices and curries. Khichdee.com is, in a way, a mixture of classifieds that have already been published online. These classifieds have been organised into categories and are presented to viewers in a searchable format. Khichdee.com aims to bring all the classifieds that are published on-line at one place. So as a buyer, you get the entire set of classifieds published online for your preferred product / service in your preferred city, at one place, and reduces the bother of browsing and navigating through a large number of other websites publishing on-line classifieds. As a seller, you get probably, the largest number of buyers interested in your product / service not just from your city, but from across the globe. As a publisher of online classifieds, you get added traffic because they also publish the URL where the ad appeared originally, that is on your site. Great idea to search for cars, bikes, property, real estate, matrimonials, brides, grooms, jobs, resumes, goods and services all in one place!