Classifieds

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.

My mountain-biking group here in Bouder had a get-together last night — a potluck dinner followed by a biking movie (”Earthed3: Europa“: lots of nice MTB action but weak on plot or character development!). One of our members has turned a basement family room into a home theater, complete with two rows of real theater seats and risers so the folks in the back row can see well.

Here’s the part I found interesting: The set-up was all found and purchased via Craiglist. (The theater seats originally came from a theater in Los Angeles; a guy in Denver advertised them via Craig.) I hear this sort of thing so often from people I know. How did we ever survive before Craigslist came to town? … Oh, yeah, newspaper classifieds.

(And if you want to see a decent movie about mountain biking, I highly recommend “Off Road to Athens.” It actually has some personality and pathos. My wife, a non-MTBer, even enjoyed it.)