We are only now learning how to sell audience based on what we know or surmise about our audience. But we moved beyond even that on Saturday, focusing on the messages businesses want to communicate to prospective customers, most of which should be...Classified solutions
Classified advertising — which includes cars, jobs and homes — used to account for 25-50 percent of newspaper revenue. Most of that advertising has migrated from print to national aggregators online, such as CraigsList. If newspapers can recover even a portion of this lost revenue, it could be a game-changer. How’s how we propose to improve classifieds online:
Make it easy to use. In one respect, CraigsList is better than newspaper classifieds because it’s free. But more important, CraigsList is easier to use than any other newspaper classified site and that may be the bigger competitive advantage. Ironically, CraigsList isn’t particularly easy to use, but it’s easier than every other system. That’s why we made our solution easier still.
Make it easy on the eyes. Classifieds need not look like HTML 1.0. Our solution provides easy-to-use templates so any user can create a beautiful, professional-looking ad. See the description page, below.
Make it free. If newspapers are going to compete with CraigsList, and every other free classified site, they need to meet or exceed every feature of every other site. So basic listings must be free.
Make it make money: There are plenty of ways to monetize free classifieds:
- Sell context-sensitive, behaviorally targeted display ads adjacent to free listings, such as the display ads for Pohanka Honda, below.
- Sell ads on to the category-specific search pages, to get the attention of buyers even before they begin their search. See the category-specific search page, below.
- Provide “premium” listings above the free listings in search results, as Google does now.
- Serve up links to “premium” listings at the bottom of any page that provides the details of a free listing. You can see examples beneath the heading “Check out complete listings” on the description page, below.
The examples described above are primarily for commercial customers. Here are some of the upsells for private-party advertisers:
- More photos
- More keywords
- More prominent appearance and position in search results
- Choice of visual “theme” for your description page
- Block links from competing ads from appearing on your description page
- Allow ad to appear active longer
Make it safe: Craigslists shouts “Let the buyer beware!” — which doesn’t give anyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. While newspapers should leverage their reputation as the most trusted medium, even they cannot vouch for ads posted online via their self-service tools. So newspapers must provide a “reputation engine” where users can post their experiences with sellers, both good and bad, as eBay does now. Providing sellers with a means to manage their reputations online is another source of revenue.
Make it the biggest and best marketplace. How? By aggregating CraigsList and every other local classified site, to provide one-stop shopping for every buyer.
Read more on the design thinking behind the team’s approach to the user interface (SND Update)
Classified homepage, above
Category-specific search page for cars, above
Results page, above
Description page, above
22. March 2009 at 11:32 pm :
When I go to a Web site like Amazon.com, I really appreciate their “used and new from [enter lowest price here]” link. I think this ‘newspaper Craigslist’ might benefit by having a similar feature. For me, I’m definitely going to click a link that takes me to the lowest priced product.
Also, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the lowest priced item…it could be ‘most trusted seller,’ etc.
Anyway, this template for the possible site looks great.
23. March 2009 at 12:26 am :
Part of what we talked about in the group is what a user is doing at any given moment. That’s how we came up with the “I have/I want” split on the home page, and it drove most of our conversation about contextual ads.
We figured that each time someone shows an interest in a kind of product–a car, in this case–it’s a chance to offer alternatives, and then to refine those based on filters, getting more feedback along the way. And those alternatives are up-sold versions of regular listings.
23. March 2009 at 12:30 pm :
What does this have to do with news?
If I want to be a reporter or an editor, that implies that I DONT want to be a salesman or to have to deal with supposed clients.
The two require diametrically opposed skill sets. Its almost an “either/or” situation.
The post office right now is hurting for cash.
Junk/bulk mail is down because spam offers much more attractive ROI. The results of a campaign may be low but the costs are even lower.
The internet is an all encompassing revolution in communication.
I bet that the post office would be quite willing to enter into any agreement with anybody who would make them more relevant, like delivering .PDFs of a NewsSheet over the internet for a small amount.
They’d collect the cash and deliver the .PDF from their own RSS feed and pay the copyright owners.
Has anybody approached them? I bet not.
You’re all trying to do Apple’s and Craiglist’s and whoever else’s job for them. That will only garner resentment and antitrust suits.
I smell disaster.
23. March 2009 at 1:46 pm :
“newspapers should leverage their reputation as the most trusted medium” …. most trusted?… LOL, anyone seen my WMD’s lately?.
Rumzzy.
23. March 2009 at 1:57 pm :
Charles,
The only job we’re trying to do is keep newspapers alive. We want our industry to survive.
“You’re all trying to do Apple’s and Craiglist’s and whoever else’s job for them.”
No. We’re trying to keep newspapers competitive in an era when they’re struggling financially. We’re trying to help them learn to think outside their structures so they can build new, better products. We want to help them compete with Craigslist and build better relationships with small businesses and not screw up the next battlefields for media.
It has everything to do with news; we’re trying to stay open-minded enough to say we’re not afraid to look at the other side if it means that it’ll help us be able to focus on our mission as journalists in the long term. If it means a future for local news products, I’m not afraid to let that line blur like we did this weekend.
We’re not asking you to stop writing articles or editing stories. We’re trying to help along our ad side so that they can better sell classifieds in an era where classifieds are on shaky ground.
Let us not be so righteous that we’re afraid of new ideas.
24. March 2009 at 12:21 am :
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
You want new ideas?
How about this?
What a radical step it would be if we were to actually focus on content and leave the business of broken business models to those who can actually fix them? (Hint: Apple, craiglist and Google are NOT your enemy.)
How bout if we fix what is actually broken?
The distribution of physical objects is part of the problem, the biggest part.
Ally yourselves with someone who is NOT in the business of content creation but who IS in the business of content delivery and could act as your news-agent.
I spent thirty years in the software development business and I regret to tell you that there is ONLY ONE WAY that your approach can work against the Apples, Craig Newmarks and Googles of this world as they are light years ahead of anything you’re ever likely to conceive, create, code, test, distribute, and maintain quality control and version/revision control over.
The only way to win this fight is with “jujitsu” and armed with Sun Tzu’s “Art Of War.”
You must leave the field of battle entirely to them. Fight the enemy by not fighting the enemy but instead by turning them into your allies.
In order for Apple, craiglist and Google NOT to be your enemy, they must be your tools.
Fix the post offices problem by offering them content for them to distribute, for money, electronically and they can fix your problems of distributing your content and they can even collect the money for you.
The redistribution of information CAN be contained with “summary” pages while the complete story is for your customers, your paying customers, delivered via RSS to the end-user from storage servers owned by the post office.
The post office can enter into whatever arrangement it need to with the Googles of the world which you can hide behind but the information stays with the Post Office while the summary pages can go anywhere.
You don’t need infrastructure. You only need skill.
That’s a new idea…
24. March 2009 at 1:22 am :
Seems like ya’ll have come with a really solid plan for redoing classifieds sales online. I was really please to see the inclusion of aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?
The one concern I had when reading the plan is that the premium content very much follows a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it’s not very user friendly.
If you take a look at the model that of some of the pioneers of freemium, (37signals), they’ve got with a stratified pricing scheme.
Recognizing that a tiered system is a different selling scheme, I opine that it’s more user friendly. Let users pick from three options: free, extra, and high class.
Each tier will give them more benefits, and simplify the overall experience.
I’ve got a blog post with more.
24. March 2009 at 10:39 am :
Hey Joey,
Good thinking, and deeper into the details than we got in a day, actually. I think tiers are a good way to think about it.
A lot of what we’d talked about were simple one-time enhancements–make this ad better–or premium ads over premium accounts. No reason both systems couldn’t coexist, though.
Part of the question behind whether to use tiered accounts and/or premium ads is how people will actually use it. For regular power users, a premium account makes more sense. For people like me, who browse craigslist twice a year (before and after a move, or when I sell a car) a slightly better ad would probably be all I’d need.
I’ll check out that post. Thanks for the thoughts.
26. March 2009 at 12:34 am :
These look like Ernie’s design, am I right?
Looks good. I also agree with Ernie in response to Charles.
Journalists DO ally themselves with people who are good at this, they are called the sales people. You may not normally see them in news organizations, they are well hidden. Us journalism people aren’t allowed to talk to those sales people, they do nasty business dealings.
Journalists should also be thinking about these things. It’s the separation from any thought about how to make money or give people what they want/need that has caused problems. If we’re not thinking about how to save our asses, who will? I don’t think many others think about it. So far everyone is just passing the buck to the person next to them saying, “It’s not my job, I just write stories.” Eventually you drop the buck into an empty chair and we go nowhere.
8. April 2009 at 11:43 pm :
The paper part of the newspaper is dead … Get over it.
The only thing that will remain is going to be vanity presses like HP is proposing with their printing service [ http://magcloud.com/ ]
We didn’t fight for the rights of the buggy whip makers either … Suck it up.
Journalism however is definitely NOT DEAD.
It has been democratized, popularized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.
If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.
We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.
The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.
Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.
This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp.
Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.
a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.
b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.
c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with with their business model.
d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)
There is a business model that would work, it would
1) let new gathering organizations gather news,
2) let readers read,
3) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds
13. April 2009 at 12:33 am :
I got tired of waiting and sent my suggestions off.
The worse part of waiting for somebody else to see something is that they might not see what’s right in front of their eyes.
Nor do they get the hint, no matter how broadly it given.
So I decided to stop namby-pandy-ing about, making suggestions about fixing the medium of what will soon no longer be called the press.
I wrote to the most eminent editor, writer, newsman, that I could think of, Sir Harold Evans.
Then I wrote to Mr. John E. Potter, the US Postmaster General.
I wrote them both about my idea of what a collaboration between the post office and the publishers could accomplish.
If I get a reply, it will be a miracle, but you never know.
Basically, I wrote to Sir Evans was:
Separating “News” from “papers” is the first half of the problem..
That would cut the costs of reporting “news” to the barest minumum.
Google indexing of news is a non-issue. It can definitely be handled without a problem by co-opting them while hanging onto the “news” and letting go of the information when its the “olds”.
RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds can let people know that there is some new information file somewhere while keeping that file hidden from Google. The generation of the RSS feed can be automatic and consist of an alphabetical list of the words of interest in the information and a snippet of the content after which a person can decide whether it is of interest or not. The information file itself is instantly accessible, but on a subscription or a one-time-charge basis.
The other half of the problem is finding a partner to handle the money aspect.
Someone who:
• nobody expects to work for free,
• is quite used to small sums,
• can act as a non-lending bank,
• can issue small denomination pieces,
• has the required international agreements,
• has the necessary IT infrastructure to handle RSS requests,
• is already in the business of information distribution for “franking” or FOR MONEY.
That someone sounds an awful lot like “The Post Office,” doesn’t it?
If you want the “news”, you pay for it, from your “news” provider, paid for through the Postal Service.
If you just want the “olds” you can use Google to search for it.
What I wrote to Mr Potter is more complicated, more detailed and covers the expenditure requirements and the income opportunities of such a joint venture.
Sadly, I didn’t get to gather together all of the information I’d put out there before sending it off, so regretfully I don’t have it here for you to read.
But you can rest assured I was on my best business behavior.
No more pussyfooting around.