Online Classifieds Keep On Rolling

from the it's-all-there-in-black-and-white dept

A new stat says that in March, visits to online classified ads represented almost 3 percent of web traffic, up 84 percent than the year-earlier figure. More than half of that growth occurred between January and March, and the company that tracked the stat credits people turning to the sites to sell their stuff to scrape together some cash for the growth. So if the growth of classified sites is booming, shouldn't that be good news for newspapers? It would be if they hadn't lost a lot of the online classified market to sites like Craigslist, whose simplicity, effectiveness and business model have attracted users in droves. So while newspaper execs lay the blame for their business' demise on Google, Craigslist might be a more worthy target. Except, of course, for the fact that Craigslist's success has been built on filling a space that the earlier leaders in classifieds -- the newspapers -- couldn't or wouldn't fill online.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Will Professor Craigslist Please Comment On The Tribune's Decision To Drop Job Ads?

from the contrast dept

We've already seen newspapers blame Craigslist for the various troubles they face (rather than recognizing the problem is their own ability to adjust and adapt). So it will be interesting to see how various journalists react to the news that Craigslist is now endowing a journalism professorship at UC Berkeley with a few million dollars of its ample profits. And, as an interesting contrast to that announcement, Marc Andreessen points us to the news that the Chicago Tribune has decided to give up printing job ads during the week. It's quite likely that Craigslist is doing quite well with job listings in Chicago... and not just on weekends. However, this doesn't mean that Craigslist "killed" the Tribune's job listing section -- but that the Tribune was way too slow in reacting to the changing market. Hopefully, whoever takes on the role of the Craigslist professor will know not to blame sites like Craigslist and Google for newspapers unwillingness to adapt.

16 Comments | Leave a Comment..