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What if ...
What if cutting back isn't the answer?
To ANYTHING.
What if recognizing where our competition lies and actively doing something about it is?
This isn't about making money in a day. This is about exposing yourself to a potential market, pointing out advantages YOU have to that market, and setting the table to tap that market for the next five years.
WHAT IF newspapers would aggressively go after a portion of Craigslist's market?
WHAT IF instead of undercutting media competition, we were undercutting our revenue competition?
WHAT IF the following commercial ran tomorrow?
(Scene: Lame, lame, LAME, infomercial-line black-and-white shot of 20-something looking for an apartment on a web site called Gregg's List Free Classifieds.)
Apt. Hunter (clicking through ads): "Scam. Scam. Bait-and-switch. Listed downtown but it's in the suburbs. Scam. Mailing list. Porn link. Scam. Scam. (looks puzzled at the camera). WOW. FREE CLASSIFIEDS. (shrugs). I GUESS I GET WHAT I PAY FOR! (look of despair)."
Voice over: "Tired of the hassle and corruption that comes with buying and selling online for free? Well, at the (Tribune, L.A. Times, Courant, whatever) Classifieds, we make all that go away, and we want you back. And that's why on Saturday January 32, we want to show you how much. On Saturday January 32, your ad can run with us for free. That's right, free. And we'll put it in front of 10 million sets of eyes, coast to coast, for free. Just to go newspaperwebsite.com or call 800-999-9999 to find out more."
(Scene: Happy apartment hunter with keys to his new apartment, with a creepy grin on his face.)
(END)
What if all the (Gannett, Tribune, Belo, Lee) papers had a free classified day together, in print and online, in a one-time special section? It would be a lot of work. You'd have to market it. You'd have to design it in such a way that it's the most organized set of classifieds in world history (thus undercutting a Craigslist sticking point -- if you’re not at the top of the list, you have to be sought out to be seen). And you let anyone who wants to advertise do so, so long as you verify their legitimacy.
And then what if you tell everyone that if they like what they got, if they enjoy getting in front of everybody instead of being in front of a few lucky searchers for a short time until their product/whatever gets bumped off the Craigslist front page, then they can have it again and again.
And the last Saturday of every month, you do one of those sections. Only after the initial free one, inclusion in that section -- which you will market the grit out of -- will be free to anyone who bought a classified ad any time that month. No other catches or requirements.
Between digging your competition and more importantly the marketing of your classifieds, isn't it worth the newsprint? Take it out of existing space. You call the section FreeSells (or whatever).
You do this. And in doing so, you accomplish several things:
* You market your desperate selves in a way that doesn't come across as desperate.
* You get front and center in the middle of the Craigslist base user.
* And if you deliver and don't screw over your customer with some hidden catch, you'd open yourself to new classified advertisers for the first time in 10 years. If you got one out of every 10 Craigslist users to pay for one ad a month, you'd add two pages a day to your classifieds every day.
That's all you need. One out of every 10 users to buy one ad a month. ESPECIALLY if they're 29-year-olds for whom classified advertising never was a thought at any point.
The reality is, the people posting on Craigslist are for the most part, doing so because it's the only way they've ever sold things. It's the only way they ever bought things.
Astute business people call that an untapped market.
Jackasses who want to continue to blame journalists for the decline in ad revenue and continue to put them out of jobs under the guise of market demands call it killing newspapers.
So put yourself right in their faces.
People are out of work. They're downsizing. They're selling things they don't need anymore and they're looking for places to live that don't cost what they're paying now. That's a reality. And we're sitting idly by, lamenting about how they don't use us anymore instead of getting in their faces and showing them how useful we can be to them at this time.
Don’t get me wrong, the self-fulfilling prophecy we’re on right now is cool too. Just throwing out a different angle on it.
Posted by Josh Crutchmer
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| December 11, 2008 | Permalink
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Comments
Truthfully, classifieds are online now. We just need to face it. That doesn't mean news publications no longer have a play there, though.
Craigslist is full of scammers and sleaze bags. I was thinking of getting a puppy last week. Adoption sites are set up well, but if I want a new dog, I ended looking at the news classifieds site. More trustworthy.
I sold my last car through cars.com, not craigslist. It took a couple of months but I got serious buyers and got a good price for the car. I paid a small amount for the ad.
Our brands still mean something. We need to produce easier classified sites, easier to search, easier to buy into and with some vetting of scammers.
Posted by: Rich | Dec 11, 2008 2:31:17 PM
Heck, we could set it up so that if you buy a classified with us, it also ends up on craigslist and monster and cars.com and whatever. The google model.
Posted by: Rich | Dec 11, 2008 2:33:37 PM
I guess I really don't care whether people want their ads online or in print, only that we actively seek to make whatever choice our consumers want to use easier and more sensible than the competition.
Posted by: Josh Crutchmer | Dec 11, 2008 5:11:02 PM
i'm not sure how this section will be "easier and more sensible than the competition."
* will i be able to search this insert for keywords?
* will it organize the classifieds so that only one category appears per page?
* will it allow me to customize the type size on that page to make it readable?
* will it allow me to search for apartment listings by price, number of bedrooms and compatibility with pets?
* will a community of readers flag the (probably less-frequent) scam and porn ads so that the classified department at the paper can remove those in future editions?
the slide in classifieds revenue was, is and will be a huge problem, and i love that you're trying to think outside the box to do so. but i feel obligated to point out that online classifieds, when done properly, offer plenty of advantages besides just "free."
Posted by: strongpoint | Dec 11, 2008 8:34:08 PM
IF better-designed and more useful classifieds were the answer -- and that's a big "IF" -- then why hasn't anyone picked up and used a model that was developed nearly 20 years by Knight-Ridder's experimental Boca Raton paper?
I subscribed to it for several months. To my shame, I didn't keep any copies. I sure wish I had.
The major classified components -- auto, housing, help-wanted -- were arranged into grids. Several very logical categories ran across the top of the grid. Each ad ran the same size. To the buyer, it may have seemed like additional constraints on advertising. But to the user -- man, was it easy to scan to find just what you were looking for.
And if you wanted a bigger ad, you could simply buy a small display ad. No problem.
At the time, this seemed like radical thinking. But now, I recognize this as basically the closest print can come to what you're finding in searchable, sortable online classifieds.
I keep waiting for someone to pull out this trick again and give it a shot.
Craigslist? Yeah, it's popular among young folks -- or, at least, folks younger than me. But there's a lot of shady stuff there. It bugs me greatly that advertisers can get away with stuff at Craigslist that would bring law enforcement down upon their noggins if they bought print ads.
It also cracks me up that online folks scream whenever the cops here in Virginia Beach make prostitution busts based on ads they find on Craigslist. Like, y'know, Craigslist is supposed to be off-limits or something to the laws of the land.
Jeez. I was making good points there until I suddenly started sounding like my grandfather...
Posted by: Charles Apple | Dec 12, 2008 7:51:01 AM
Correct. It's not the fact that Craigslist and online classifieds exist, it's that we as newspapers have done very little to step up our own efforts in that area, while watching it siphon away.
I guess if there's a point to this diatribe, it's that we have passed high time to change that.
Posted by: Josh Crutchmer | Dec 12, 2008 9:34:14 AM
It really doesn't have to be limited to the traditional, straightforward ad either.
Couldn't a paper's Web site provide a practical alternative to ebay, locally, because you don't have to deal with shipping?
We'll never cause Craigslist, ebay or anyone else to take a major hit, but who cares? All we want are some of their market back and we should treat them as "rightfully ours" and act accordingly.
Posted by: Josh Crutchmer | Dec 12, 2008 9:40:55 AM
Look at iTunes. You can get music for free, but it is a success. Why? Because it offers a well designed, dependable service. And because everyone wants an iPod.
Posted by: Rich | Dec 12, 2008 12:59:42 PM
Rich, iTunes isn't exactly a very good analogy. The only way to get free music is to get it illegally. That's not the case with craigslist.
That's not to say design can't help us with classifieds, but it isn't the only factor.
Why is it that our newspapers don't compete head to head with creigslist? Why not make free classifieds on our website?
It sounds like cannibalization, but at the very least, you'd draw traffic to YOUR site and not somewhere else. Put ads on those pages -- draw in some revenue.
Newspapers need to compete on the front that's killing them: the internet. Why don't we invest in social media (like digg/reddit/delicious) that makes news FUN. Why are our classifieds so restrictive? Why aren't they all online as well as in print?
When our websites do well, we gain name recognition. This is vital.
Imagine if digg put out a daily newspaper -- don't you think people would buy it?
There is a whole frontier we are missing out on. Guys in their basements are killing companies with hundreds of employees.
Posted by: Chris | Dec 13, 2008 1:09:30 PM
It's being done to some extent at newspapers. The Times of Northwest Indiana lists anything under $500 for free, as well as some sections offer completely free listings. You can check it out at:
Posted by: Yuri Victor | Dec 18, 2008 10:45:10 AM
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