Media Companies, get your classifieds back!

Dave Asher
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

A quick recap.

Around 20 years ago media companies who owned newspapers were the Kings of Classifieds.

Around 1995, with the explosion of the internet, all traditional classified advertising started disappearing from the newspapers mostly into privately held companies. Craigslist being the biggest print classifieds killer of them all.

Why then did the large media companies of the day appear to simply let classifieds slip away and with it huge amounts of revenue?

Fear

We all know that the fear of loss caused the demise of the media’s stronghold over the classifieds market. The fear of seeing revenue shift from print to what was then a very unknown online world where the same profit margins would not be realised. This created a self preservation mindset amongst the print media world which saw them watching from the sidelines in denial as new online ventures sprung up eager to take on the opportunity that was basically left wanting by the media.

Not that media completely ignored the online movement, their focus just wasn’t on the classifieds arena but rather on what was most important to them, editorial content. Their early venture into the online space began with taking the editorial content they were printing online using Content Management Systems (CMS) to curate and then publish their content online.

The only problem with this direction was the fact that classified listings weren’t that easily replicated from print to online. That the typical lineage classified adverts were no longer suitable for advertising online. They lacked the important details needed to build a decent online search and listing product. They also didn’t contain the essential metadata that the early search engines needed in order to provide a means to index them.

Classifieds Tech is left behind

This meant that as the CMS technology improved, the much needed classifieds tech fell behind to the point where it no longer existed in major media companies. Enter the independent entrepreneurs who saw the classifieds gap and ran with it building huge online classified businesses over the years that followed.

While this trend continued unabated, the only reaction from media companies was to hold onto their classified print revenue at all costs. Has this worked for them? I think we all know the answer to that question.

So why the history lesson? Why bring this up now when it’s almost a forgone conclusion that these traditional media companies will never again feature in the online classified space unless they acquire, at significant cost, independent online classified businesses?

Media companies shouldn’t have to own a classified portal to be in the classified business

Media companies have successfully built large audiences around the quality content that they publish online and yet they have struggled to significantly monetize this audience further than the traditional digital display advertising strategies they have adopted.

Any attempt to commercialise further into the online classifieds market is met with a perplexing array of difficulties. Notwithstanding the fact that publishing content and the growth of an audience base against which they sell digital advertising is a vastly different business to that of online classifieds. To think they are similar in any way and that the same resources (human and technical) used for one can successfully manage the other is like expecting a motor mechanic to fix a computer and visa versa a IT technician to repair an engine!

Relabelit

This is where Relabelit comes in. Not only do we believe that there’s a place for these traditional media companies within the online classifieds space, outside of ownership, we’re actually creating these opportunities for them today.

Two years ago we built our Relabelit software that enables a classified portal to integrate into a news content website allowing the entire portal to be accessible to that news site’s users. I’ve written about this in more detail here, Building Portal Networks.

With this type of integration we know that publishers and portals can work together with leveraging off each others strengths, that being the publisher’s traffic and the portals inventory, to build stronger collaborative businesses.

Publishers are giving away their biggest asset — Users

Imagine if you owned a media company and you had a large amount of traffic coming to your news content website on a daily basis and yet you didn’t have any listing inventory like Cars, Jobs, Property or a local Business Directory for example. You’d want to somehow bring that element of online content into your digital asset wouldn’t you. And you probably do, just not in the way that creates any real value for you as a publisher.

You’re probably running an affiliate or partner program with a few of the online classifieds players in your market? Probably the largest or 2nd largest one in fact. However, what you’re doing is selling your traffic to them, possibly for a very small fee. You could be growing your traffic off the back of their listings and monetize that traffic right on their listing pages. Instead of paying them for traffic that you are losing, that’s right, you’re “leaching” your traffic away to a classifieds portal, you could be building a bigger audience network that you can generate revenue from while adding value back to the audience as well as yourselves.

Does this option adversely affect the Portals?

Actually quite the opposite. When a Portal decides to provide a Publisher with a Relabeled Portal rather than an iFramed version of their website or a separate white labeled instance, they are no longer splitting their efforts across all these versions of their portal for one, they are also no longer actually “buying” traffic from the Publisher and therefore shouldn’t have to pay for it, in fact, they would be setting up a Positive Sum Game otherwise known as a Win-Win situation where both parties are better off.

If you’re a portal owner or a publisher with a news site and are interested in what we’re doing for Portals and Publishers around the world then please drop us a line, we’d be happy to help! info@relabelit.com

Classifieds are coming back to old Media
Dave Asher

Written by

A serial entrepreneur with a love for animals who’s enjoying the shift in global consciousness

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