There are lots of tough jobs in the newspaper industry right now. (CEO of Knight Ridder springs to mind.) Clearly one of the most challenging is managing a newspaper company’s classifieds strategy.
Here’s another development that’ll keep those folks awake at nights.
Microsoft is about to jump into the game with a free-classifieds
product, code-named Fremont, according to Classified Intelligence Report, a publication of Peter M. Zollman‘s consulting company. (Zollman is a fellow blogger here on E-Media Tidbits.) According to a story by Mary Hunt for CIR, Fremont is being designed as “touchy-feely-friendly” and “community-oriented.” Think Craigslist
“with all sorts of tech-savvy bells and whistles and abilities to
classify, sort, and map; that’s where Microsoft is going.” (Sorry, no
link to Hunt’s story; CIR is a paid newsletter.)
So, we now have three major free-classifieds initiatives eating away at
the old newspaper model of people paying for classifieds: Craigslist,
Microsoft’s Fremont, and Google Base. (My previous posts on the latter are here and here.)
What this means, I think, is that the old model for classifieds is in
mortal danger — now. Newspapers need to move more quickly toward
learning how to survive by giving away classified ads for free. It’s
not as crazy as it sounds. Zollman’s company actually just published
another (paid) report that offers lots of suggestions: “Free classifieds: They’re all the rage, but where’s the money?.”
The keys to making money from free classifieds are: 1) The classic
upsell; giving away ads free but charging for special features to make
the ads stand out amid the clutter. 2) Selling contextual advertising
around the free ads. (E.g., for a free ad someone is using to sell a
used refrigerator, sell surrounding ad space to appliance stores and
repair shops.) 3) Facilitating the actual transaction resulting from the ad.
Newspaper classifieds managers should have been thinking about this
stuff for some time. Adding Microsoft to the free-classifieds space
makes it all the more urgent for newspapers to start acting.
(And here’s yet another tidbit picked up from CIR: Google is currently looking to hire a new classifieds director.)
