Hello OC friends,
We are back on useful wednesdays, hope you enjoy our useful post!
Today we are going to talk about the changing world for advertisers and how classifieds website can profit from that.
Internet is still steadily growing and better accessible by everyone, traditional media and businesses are having problems adapting to this. Retailers and other business have to change their business model. Almost every product can be bought online these days and people often prefer to buy from a website, instead of going to a shop, because it is more comfortable and easy to do.
Also TV, radio, newspapers and magazines have to change their old business model. TV is not anymore the only place where people can watch television programs or movies, news does not necessarily have to be read in a printed newspaper, but can be found anywhere online.
For newspapers another challenge is the declining revenues from advertisements. This source of income is one of the most important ones for newspapers, but they are going down.
A study by Robert Seamans and Feng Zu, researchers from the New York University and the University of Southern California, investigated the impact of Craigslist on local newspapers. The impact of Craigslist has been very big on these newspapers. Craigslist is a very disruptive competitor as it offers classifieds ads for free. Besides that ads are easy to search and can be updated easily. The study estimates that in the period of 2002-2007, 5.4 billion US dollars has been saved on advertising, due to Craigslist. It is therefore also sometimes called a real ‘newspaper killer’.
The paper shows that classifieds websites, like Craigslist are directly competing with other providers of advertising space, like newspapers. And Classifieds website are doing this successfully. The graph below shows the traffic development of Craigslist over the past five years.
The figure shows that there is still an increase in the number of people using classifieds websites, like Craigslist. Knowing that the trend to do more online shopping is still going upwards, we can expect that also classifieds websites will profit from this. Don’t think you are too late creating your own classifieds website, but start one today, with Open Classifieds! Also you can create a Craigslist Clone and start your own business with OC.
[jetpack_subscription_form]
