- The End of Newspapers? -
When Google launched the beta of Google Base (see previous posting), the German magazine
Der Spiegel predicted the
end of classified ads and the final decline of daily newspapers. Of course they were not the first one to predict that -- John Dvorak, for instance, said in
Newspapers and Movies -- Both Fading Fast that "craigslist has probably sunk the business, with free classified advertising that is far more useful and functional than anything delivered by any newspaper. There was a lot of money made by the classifieds. That money is gone. Nobody knows how the newspapers can recover."
What we are witnessing is race for these new markets. Ebay launched
Kijiji earlier this year, a free classified ad service available in many countries (except for the US). Of course craigslist has been adding international sites for a while, but Kijiji seems to be improving on it. For example, when I recently looked up Kijiji München (note that Kijiji is
localized in many venues, whereas craiglist is in English), it offered 1,818 for sale/wanted ads, compared to a meagre 86 on craigslist Munich, while Paris had over 10,000 ads on Kijiji and only 528 on craigslist.
Newspapers have been trying out their own web-based classified, but my local paper certainly hasn't done it right. I tried to run an ad there the other day, but gave up on it as the process was so cumbersome compared to craigslist.
The proliferation of free classifieds on the web has its drawbacks to. Craigslist, for instance, routinely adds warnings about fraud and scam to responses from potential buyers. As with e-mail, once the cost of scams tends towards zero, their number will rise.
Whether Google base will turn out to be the big newspaper killer remains to be seen, but the general trend does not look good for the dailies.
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