The week's really been about classifieds. It might have been about Google and YouTube or even Iran, Bush, Blair, Bertie or bungs but it's definitely been about classifieds and classifieds are what will change our lives.
What's currently protecting newspapers from rapid decline - in fact what's keeping newspapers buoyed - is the fact that the majority of businesses are not yet online. That means they're not yet part of the online classifieds mix. That means the media industries are not changing fast enough which in turn is reflected in the small revenue potential, as yet, for the blogger, the podcaster, the vidcaster and the small web publisher—even one called YouTube.
Online classifieds have the potential to decimate newspaper earnings but not for as long as businesses are not online.
Add in another curious fact. For the most part online ads to date have taken the wrong approach. Take job ads, which have simply emulated the newspaper experience of paid-for ads but with a few fringe benefits.
They emphasise ease of use by the advertising company. Getting ads close to an appropriate audience for example, giving access to a return on investment analysis, being able to search online CVs. All very well, but in a market tight for talent, it should be geared towards the job seekers' experience.
Charlene Li pointed out a year ago now that Yahoo and Hotjobs are rethinking the strategy. Under pressure from sites that aggregate all job listings, Yahoo now crawls company websites and "scrapes" their job ads to add to its own paid-for classifieds.
Similarly Edgeio and Eventful are scraping ads from around the globe and providing a one-stop search platform for seekers of jobs, cars, houses, and venues.
Yahoo's jobs ads strategy for the past year has been to facilitate job seekers' searches and spin revenue from the search process than charging for job ads. That kind of strategy is going to hurt newspapers as they take their businesses online because it puts an upper limit on the price of a job ad.
New ideas about small ads, and ideas for getting some kind of web presence, any kind of web presence, for the majority of businesses were part of the story of the week.
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