Dan Pacheco Bakersfield Californian Today people can publish anything for free online, including ads. That means that the act of publishing is not really what they’re paying a newspaper for, or anyone for that matter. They’re paying to get their message out to a specific audience. A specific audience is different from “the largest audience [...]

New on the classifieds scene: Wal-mart! News surfaced in recent days that the giant retailer has added Wal-mart Classifieds to its website, which has an enviable 26 million unique visitors a month. It’s powered by Oodle, the Silicon Valley classifieds technology and aggregation company, and features classified ads — filtered locally — from the Oodle [...]

When reader Bob Wyman, longtime media-technology innovator and currently a member of Google’s technical staff, discovered ReinventingClassifieds.com recently, it reminded him of an essay he wrote for CMC Magazine back in 1996: “Employment Listings Are Another Forfeited Franchise.” Wyman’s distant words were a warning to the newspaper industry, urging publishers not to sit back and [...]

BOULDER, Colorado – Layoffs and cutbacks are the norm for newspapers, an industry in deep crisis. While many factors account for their decline, one of the biggest is the loss of billions of dollars in classified advertising revenue in recent years. Online competitors from Monster.com to eBay Motors to Realtor.com to Craigslist have taken away [...]

We’ve got an ongoing survey here on ReinventingClassifieds.com — click here to take it — and already there are some great ideas being shared. (I’ve already written up a few of the results: here, here, and here.) One of the open-ended questions in the survey has resulted in some insightful ideas about how to reinvent [...]

Due to lack of time my last post was a little short so I am trying to get a little more detailed this time. As a consulting agency and software developer we work closely with newspapers in Europe to create the strategies and implement the technology and culture to make them a success. One of [...]

If, like me, you’ve been reading newspapers for a long time (I’ve been reading the New York Times almost every day for 40 years), you noticed the dramatic decline in classified ad pages. Back in the 1950s my dad would carefully look read the classified ads in the papers of any town he visited. He [...]

We are working with a client to target classified ads. Similar to a Google-AdSense-Sidebar (or Amazon Shoplet), the products are related to the content displayed in the main area. We are also able to integrate the ads in mails such as newsletters or even print-mailings. Further, we want to offer an alert-system that allows the [...]

Robertson Adams I think classifieds will take at least two routes forward. First, I think buyers and sellers will connect through web services such as SOAP, which means my mom would find an intermediary such as her local newspaper which would create a search agent that would find qualified buyers for her home or car, [...]

I keep thinking about Seesmic, a fairly new video discussion website that’s currently in alpha phase, and pondering how it might apply to the classifieds space. And I think there’s potentially something big there. Briefly, Seesmic combines a discussion forum with video. A user posts a quick video — typically just talking into the web-cam [...]