We just started a jobs vertical to join the other categories.

You can see it on a couple of other sister station sites: KTAR in Phoenix and WTOP in Washington, D.C. Neither of them have the volume that KSL does yet, due to the relative ages (KSL has been doing it since ~2000, the others for just a few months).

I think a perfect illustration of the problem with classifieds on local paper sites is Alexa’s “Page Views per User” statistic. Go to the traffic rankings for your local paper’s site and look at that stat: it likely hovers in the 2-4 range. Now look at craigslist’s: it hovers around 22. That tells me that the papers are either outsourcing their classifieds or else have a bad classifieds site.

For those who want an example of a classifieds site that is holding its own against craigslist, click on my name. The site is run by a local TV station (KSL in Salt Lake City, Utah), and Alexa shows it as getting ~12 Page Views per User. (Disclaimer: I work for the station.)

how about a little math lesson?

say the consort takes in $1 in rev.-

on a 50/50 split yahoo gets .50 and the consort splits .50 between 555 papers

yahoo wins by 555X over each and every paper!!!

all you icons of broadcast feel free to jump me at any time and say that the icons of print would never agree to a 50/50 split.

i’ll save you the bother and illustrate it in another way;

the consort takes in $1 in rev.-

the consort of 555 newspapers gets .99 of every dollar (in your dreams) and little old yahoo gets .01.

yahoo still wins by 5.55X over each and every paper.

making deals with ags as your salvation is a loser.

but they’ll probably add more newspapers next week.

That same site probably reached 2 to 4 percent of the DMA audience on any given day.

In other words, the newspaper.com is OUTPERFORMING the newspaper in revenue, but falling way short in audience reach.

Newspapers don’t have a revenue problem. They have an audience problem.

The only place you can put the blame for that is on the newspaper, not on Craig Newmark.

what i have always wondered is why don’t classified-driven sites build bots to post stubs of their own ads into craigslist and other such sites for added value and marketing that would drive traffic back to the full ad.

same thing for creating a youtube channel to share short bits of your video traffic to drive traffic back to the full version.

i posted an excellent forbes analysis of the washington post online vs. print economy a few months ago that spells out the digital/print advertising divide better than anywhere else i\’ve ever seen, but it deals primarily with display and image oriented advertising and addresses the key economic issue facing the online medium - bottomless advertising inventory and exponential increase in competition suppresses value where cost barriers to entry in publishing and broadcasting previously enabled higher pricing. still, the majority of local market advertisers still perceive a higher value in the print product and audience than they do in nebulous and intangible online space.

the issue is in monetizing audience and finding rates that work and deliver value to advertisers. craig has built his brand and is on an even keel in terms of the audience in each market. google created the market for search advertising and adwords, which is another direct competitor to text liner advertising and never existed prior to the medium. the technology marries the ad message to an interested audience in a micro transactional format, providing a turnkey service that offers a lower pricepoint and higher value in the online space than the account executive footsoldier model print and broadcast are accustomed to.

as print and broadcast move online, the money is better spent developing turnkey advertiser services and also focusing in on aggregating advertising content in the local market. as a customer who may be seeking to buy something like a car or a matress or find a job, i used to be able to go to one or two sources to hunt down the bargain buy. now, with the many competitors in the online space, that search is challenged and frustrating. a newspaper could offer tremendous value in aggregating all those widespread ads and delivering them along with their own listings, making my search easier and protecting their own standing as the top market dog by being the one stop shop for all things local.

the boat was missed when major companies didn\’t create their own adwords programs and text ad aggregator services for their local properties. larry and sergey recognized the opportunity and capitalized on it, and the door was open for craig to reveal that the value in classifieds had been overinflated for years due to a monopoly on the format.

Instead, they insist on making numerous mistakes on their own classifieds sites; almost every newspaper site I’ve seen has horrible classifieds. Why? The pages are complicated and busy. They are slow to load, making browsing a chore. They insist on making the users do some sort of search before they can start browsing through ads. They want to charge a fee to post an ad; some of the worst sites even want to keep charging per word.

The battle over classified ads isn’t lost and craigslist isn’t the nirvana of online ads. Newspapers have historically been known for providing classified ads, and they can reclaim that title if they would just put some more thought into their sites.

Please. Newspapers are hugely profitable. One of the most profitable industries around.

“A typical newspaper with a 100,000 circulation makes a 15.6 percent annual pre-tax profit margin, according to Inland Daily Press Association and the International Newspaper Financial Executives. The Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other media outlets, for example, operates on an 18.3 percent pre-tax profit margin. Gannett, which owns 90 newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, operates on a 21.4 percent pre-tax profit margin. By comparison, Walmart Stores Inc. operates on a 5.4 percent pre-tax profit margin, while Exxon Mobil Corporation operates on a 17.9 percent pre-tax profit margin.”

Click my name for the link.

Newspapers may be in a negative growth period, but they can’t claim poverty. When will the profits return? They never left.