Local media sites (especially newspapers) inevitably wrestle with the decision of whether to work with an ad aggregation service to balloon their classified ad inventory. At first blush, this strategy seems sound. After all, ad volume is necessary to sustain an active marketplace. But a closer examination of this strategy reveals significant risks for newspapers and other media players who relinquish control over their classified ad market to a commodity player. Read More »
Posted by Michael Kranitz |
08/26/09 | No Comments »
About 225 GM dealers in California are set to start selling autosmobiles on EBay tomorrow. The dealers will let consumers haggle over the prices of new cars and trucks through the online marketplace. They will be selling Buick, Chevrolet, GMC and Pontiac vehicles on cobranded Web sites through eBay’s online auto marketplace, eBay Motors, until Sept. 8. The cars will also be searchable through eBay Motors and eBay’s main site. More…
Posted by Newswire |
08/11/09 | No Comments »
Editors note: Tony Lee, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal’s vertical web sites, is Chief Alliance Officer of Adicio, the leading software provider for career, auto and real estate classifieds, serving more than 800 media sites, including television,newspaper, magazine, association, broadcast and niche jobs sites. This interview with Mr. Lee is part of a Q&A series on best practices in local digital publishing.
Q: As the alliance officer for Adicio, you work with hundreds of publishers. Is there one thing you wish you always want to tell them about what they should do in order to be more successful?
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Posted by Alisa Cromer |
07/21/09 | No Comments »
Yesterday Borrell reported local business accounts 20% of social network dollars. I didn’t. Just couldn’t figure out what the heck publishers who read this site could do with that piece of information. Build a social network? Update their Facebook page? Be “aware” that the 20% includes some of their advertisers who may say they are cutting budgets? Seriously, do publishers really react like this to the myriad of “it’s up, it’s down” reports flooding the trades all year?
Still as blogs and pie charts dicing and parsing this important study accumulated throughout the day , I felt vaguely guilty. Until this morning when I came upon this hilarious blog from Burst Media about the media forecasting business, What the heck is display advertising anyway and who cares?: Read More »
Posted by Alisa Cromer |
07/16/09 | No Comments »
The Seatttle Times online network recently launched one new online real estate brand, “NWhomes.com”, using the Adicio Real Estate Platform. It’s the third Adicio platform for the Seattle Times, which has utilized the Careers platform since 2003 and the Automotic platform earlier this year. Read More »
Posted by Alisa Cromer |
07/14/09 | 1 Comment »
“Our objective is to give our users the same old craigslist-erotic-services-experience that they knew and loved,” says Trevor Lawrence, publisher of Stagslist.com, a Craiglist adult knock-off that launced in early July. Lawrence said he built the site for $20,000 and will spend more than that on a weekend marketing blitz. Read More »
Posted by Alisa Cromer |
07/09/09 | 1 Comment »
After law enforcement pressured Craigslist to tighten its adult advertising standards and kick out the prostitutes, SFweekly noticed something interesting. Read More »
Posted by Alisa Cromer |
06/18/09 | No Comments »
Fast facts about Craigslist today from Newsfactor:
*Almost half of all adults who use the Internet in the U.S. now rely on classified sites, double the 2005 number and the highest increase of online usage.
*Craigslist got 93% of this traffic and 46.5 million visitors in April compared to Ebay’s Kijiji with only 3.9 million (Ebay also owns a minority share in Craigslist).
* In 2008, newspapers made just under $10 billion in revenues from classifieds — a sharp drop from the peak of $19.6 billion in 2000. By comparison, Craigslist took in $81 million in revenue last year.
*According to the estimates of Altamonte Springs [Fla.]-based classifieds consultant AIM Group. “It’s not that 10 billion [dollars] have shifted online necessarily,” Forrester’s Epps says. “It’s that value has evaporated overnight.” More…
Posted by Newswire |
05/28/09 | No Comments »
A new website is shaking up the online community. Jim Bob’s List may give popular online advertising website Craigs List a run for its money.
“Jim Bob is kind of the epitome of a good old boy, a country boy kind of name,“ Mark Tims, Founder of JimBobsList said.
Timms says he created the site to serve rural communities, a group left out by Craigslist. He then chose what he considers a suitable name. More...
Posted by Newswire |
05/28/09 | No Comments »
In case anyone missed it, over the weekend Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster turned into an internet cult hero, with his now famous blog demanding an apology from an attorney general threatening to prosecute him for pandering.
From his, ”Dear South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster,” to his summarial, “We would very much appreciate an apology at your very earliest convenience,” this blog is classic.
For the fifteen years I ran alternative news-weeklies, including a brief stint running the Seattle Weekly, a Village Voice property; five years with the Orlando Weekly and more in the Bay area, most of our papers carried adult ads. The adult section was a sore subject. No matter what our suspicions, we had no actual knowledge of illegal activity, and the advertising is covered by the first amendment as long as this was true.
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Posted by Alisa Cromer |
05/19/09 | 2 Comments »
