Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Who Will Gather the News?

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Classified ads have traditionally accounted for some 40 percent of newspaper profits. Despite the effort of newspapers to establish an online presence, the fastest-growing online destinations for online advertising are free-standing websites like Craigslist.org and Trader Publishing. That’s great news for Trader, which is based in Norfolk, but bad news for businesses that build their audiences by gathering news.

According to comScore Media Metrix, online advertising traffic increased 47 percent in the past year to 37.4 million Internet users. Craigslist dominated with with 13.4 million users. But Trader Publishing came in second with 6.9 million. Autotrader.com, cars.com and other non-newspapers rounded out the Top 10 list.

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2 responses to “Who Will Gather the News?”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Trader specializes in Auto Advertising. That said, the #1 product category in terms of dollars spent on advertising is, you guessed it, automotive. You can check out the data here, http://adage.com/images/random/LNA2006.pdf.

    As for cars.com it’s owned by large newspaper publishers – “Launched in June 1998, cars.com is a division of Classified Ventures, LLC (http://classifiedventures.com), which is owned by six leading media companies: Belo Corp., Gannett Co. Inc., Knight Ridder Inc., The McClatchy Co., Tribune Co. and The Washington Post Co” (Source – http://www.cars.com/go/about/index.jsp

    The stats are interesting but not surprising. It looks as though the big media companies have adjusted their business models to compete in the online world as far as auto advertising is concerned.

    The problem is for the small town publishers, what are they going to do? IMHO, if they focus on the local news they will survive and may even prosper. A local newspaper doesn’t get much sympathy from me when it constantly runs national headlines on their front pages that are 24 hours old (sometimes more).

  2. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    Thanks anonymous for the interesting info you provided.

    Remember the Dot Com “bust”? That was when most brick and mortar companies business plans and models could not figure out how they fit into an online world and so many of them perceived the internet to be a flash in the pan fad?

    🙂

    There really was a “bust” in the sense that many folks who did not understand the internet tried to build internet companies and it took a while for the news companies to understand.. and they still are to a certain extent.

    And I agree, local papers will survive if they stick to their knitting – serving the local news needs of the local residents. Simple things like letting them know about what goes on at the Boards of Supervisors meetings, local business “success” stories, etc, etc. National news… in a local paper.. is almost becoming irrelevant between 24hr cable news and online national news….particularily GOOGLE NEWS which provides a default aggregation but also allows personal news preferences.

    Of the National Papers – USA Today … seems to have a good model to deliver national news at the local level and they seem to be on the newstands early in the morning in most places. (This is one of the things I discovered in my 60 day vacation out west. In fact, in many places, if you did not get to the USA Today box until afternoon, you often found it empty).

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