Classifieds

Craig (who needs no last name to be recognized, but it’s Newmark) spoke to editors at the Washington Post this week. Here’s a video clip:

More thoughts over on ReinventingClassifieds.com.

Over on my ReinventingClassified.com project, we’ve opened up a contest for college students (and recent grads), asking them to offer their ideas for solving the newspaper industry’s classifieds crisis.

Best essay (or video, audio, multimedia presentation, or whatever) wins $250. There’s a runner-up award of $50.

I believe that newspapers need to pretty much write off much of their old model and find a new way when it comes to classifieds. Professionals have started to offer their ideas on the site; now let’s see what the next generation of media folks can come up with.

Announcement here. Entry form here. PDF announcement flyer here.

We’ve taken the wraps off my other latest project. Introducing ReinventingClassifieds.com.

You can read about what we’re doing here: Can newspaper classifieds really be saved? The answer to that question is yes, I believe. But ONLY if newspaper publishers are willing to completely reinvent themselves. I don’t think that incremental changes or improvements to the newspaper classifieds model will be enough.

Frankly, I often feel pretty pessimistic about the newspaper industry. industry leaders seem to give me plenty of reason to see the glass as half empty and draining. But I am optimistic that through this and an affiliated initiative by Christopher Ryan of Future of News that there’s a way out of the darkness.

One of the keys to ReinventingClassifieds.com is serving as a showplace for innovative ideas by industry leaders and innovators. I’m starting to poke around and ask the industry’s brightest people to share their ideas about what it will take to save newspaper classifieds. I’ve already got a couple yes answers from people that I’m very excited to hear their thoughts.

If you’ve got a good answer to the question “What strategies do you believe are necessary to turn around the newspaper classifieds business?” please contact me (steve@outing.us). I’d love to add your perspective to the discussion we’re starting on ReinventingClassifieds.com.

I’m just curious. … This is for a newspaper classifieds project I’m working on. I’ll have a more comprehensive survey of classifieds and news managers ready soon. Meanwhile, tell me where you’re head is at about newspaper classifieds’ prospects for the future.

Go here to take the poll.

Charlotte-Anne Lucas had a great post (well, perhaps it’s better described as a rant) earlier this week about the horrendous loss of several billion dollars by the newspaper industry just in the recruitment/jobs category of classified advertising. She takes newspaper publishers to task for “blind incompetence” in not responding appropriately to online classifieds competition. It’s a good read, as is Alan Mutter’s Feb. 10 blog post, “Help Wanted, Desperately.”

Reading that duo’s thoughts, you’d be within reason to think that the newspaper industry will not recover because it’s incapable of the radical change necessary for newspaper classifieds to survive in the Internet age. Having seen the industry react too slowly and not aggressively enough on so many fronts over the last 15 years (when the Internet first burst into public consciousness), I have my doubts too that it can suddenly “get the Internet religion” and come up with something so bold and innovative to save classifieds. But I haven’t given up hope.

Sometime back in the ’90s I wrote a research report for Editor & Publisher on online classifieds, and I continue to have more than a passing interest in newspaper classifieds. I’d like to see the industry save those revenues, in order to fund the important journalism that newspaper companies produce. I’m currently involved in a couple of interesting new projects (and resisting the call to find a “real job” ), and one of them is aimed at reinventing and saving newspaper classifieds.

The classifieds project remains in stealth mode while we design and build the initiatives that will be part of it. But as we progress, we intend to be open about what we’re doing and use industry input to design the best solutions to what are now some very serious problems. Sorry not to offer more information, but this project is in its earliest stages. I do think that the ideas we’re working on have a good chance of solving some of newspapers’ problems.

I’ll post here as bits and pieces of our project are ready, and the project will have its own website ready soon: ReinventingClassifieds.com. For now there’s nothing there but a Coming Soon page and a 5-second poll.

So I’m looking for some office space in Boulder. We’re ready to stop being a virtual company. I’ve been watching the Denver Craigslist for Office Space For Lease ads, and there’s lots to choose from there.

But being an old newspaper guy, I felt it only fair to give my local paper’s classified ads a chance. So I took a look. Good grief! They’re next to worthless!

The paper’s classifieds listings for Office Space For Fease are sparse compared to Craigslist’s — only 39 ads turned up on a search of the paper’s website. But worse, the ads are typical print newspaper length. Just as in print, the ads present a few words to advertise an office for lease. Here’s a typical ad:

Riverbend Office Park across from Bldr Foothills Hosp. 300-2600sf. $12.50 NNN. $450-$3900/mo gross. 303-449-5389

Most Craigslist ads, on the other hand, include lengthy text, often some photos, and when there’s an address in the ad a link to a Google Map showing the location. Some of the smarter landlords also include links to PDF flyers for the properties. There’s enough information on most Craigslist ads to know whether it’s worth it to call. Mostly that’s not so on the newspaper classifieds.

I find this frustrating. How long has the newspaper industry known about the Craigslist threat? The best my local paper can do is shovel print text ads onto the Web? Pathetic.

Over the years of Craigslist’s meteoric growth, I received many e-mails from newspaper people (because I’ve written much about Craigslist) claiming that free classifieds can never be as good as classifieds that people pay for in newspapers. To which I say, bullshit.

Here’s an e-mail I just received from a real estate broker (who probably read one of my old articles):

“I advertise in Craiglist and on the Seattle Times Online (NO PRINT). For every 70 hits I get from the Seattle Times online real estate section, I get 700 from Craigslist. I stopped advertising in print awhile ago and I may stop my paid online real estate ads soon as well. …

“I recently moved from one house to another, I paid the major newspaper 40 bucks for a print ad and got zero response. I then put the exact same worded ad on Craigslist and had everything sold in 48 hours. There was more than one buyer for some items as well.”

Newspapers really need to figure out how to step up the value proposition. They continue to get beat by free. And when real estate professionals note this, that can’t be good for the newspaper industry.

Craigslist added another 100 cities this week, bringing the total coverage for the free-classifieds company to around 300 cities. Craig & company are, in the U.S., getting down to smaller communities now.

This means that a new wave of newspaper publishers now get to freak out about the Craigslist threat to their classifieds business model. I got a call from a reporter at the Roanoke (Virginia) Times today, wondering what might happen now that Craigslist has arrived there. I was impressed that the Times was willing to assign a story about Craigslist’s local entry; some newspapers prefer not to give Craig any publicity.

As I told the reporter, a new Craigslist in a community will take some time to build a user base, so immediate panic isn’t called for. But if and when Craigslist does catch on, then the local newspapers need to adapt. More free ads for certain categories is an obvious logical reaction, with money coming from premium upsells to free ads and contextual paid advertising surrounding the free classifieds.

Thinking of my own behavior, I told the reporter, “Newspaper classifieds are now dead to me.” That is, when I have something to sell or buy (up to and including cars), I no longer even think about my local newspaper classifieds. Craigslist in my market (Denver-Boulder, Colorado) is so widely used and works so well — at least, it has for me, multiple times — that I no longer need newspaper classifieds. They’ve been replaced by something that works better.

Microsoft’s online classifieds service (described by Gary Price as “Social Networking + Free Classified and Event Listings”) went to public beta recently. It’s thought to have been designed as a “Craigslist killer.”

The service currently is called Windows Live Expo, a name that surely was decided on by groupthink. While under development you may have heard it referred to as “Fremont.”

Now, Microsoft indeed may develop this into the next big step in online classifieds. But I don’t think it’s going to get much traction with that obtuse (and boring) name. As I went to write this item, I had to back to the site to remind myself what it’s called.

Google. Yahoo! Craigslist. eBay. … I think that having a good name can have a profound effect on an Internet company — as long as the product or service is good, of course. Even if Microsoft shortens it to Expo … blah. And just how does that conjure up the future of commerce? I’m not sure if Windows Live Expo is just a temporary name. I would hope so, or the service is doomed.

From Jemima Kiss’ report on Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster’s appearance at a conference in London earlier this week:

“By building a community where anyone can post a classified advert for free, Craigslist sites now generate a staggering 3 billion page views every month and run more classifieds than every U.S. newspaper combined.”

Wow. I can’t help but think of a lunch I was at about, oh, a year and a half ago, sitting next to a newspaper advertising director who had “heard of” Craigslist, but never actually looked at it even though it was operating in his market.