Curated classifieds: An idea for the times?

Steve Rosenbaum has written a useful trend piece for AlwaysOn, “2009 – 5 Trends That Will Change Media.” Here’s an excerpt of his first trend, which has classifieds implications:

Growth of the Curation Economy

“As the cost of the creation of content continues to come down, more content creators will come online. This will create a huge influx of unfiltered material, and create a significant demand for filters and editors who can find/sort/select and recommend contextual quality content within verticals. This ‘Curation’ function has the potential to give media enterprises whose current business models are under tremendous pressure a new and important role in the web media world. What makes the Curation Economy so powerful, and so disruptive, is that the core resource required to building a high-quality curated experience is not capital, but knowledge. This will drive an emerging class of content entrepreneurs — people who are able to turn their trusted personal brands into high-quality filtered content destinations. As the number of publishers grows dramatically, content consumers will hunger for new trusted sources. These many creators and consumers on the move will fuel whole new businesses and categories.”

I think he’s right about that from the editorial content perspective. And though he doesn’t mention advertising or classifieds, I think the model of “curation” presents an opportunity for newspaper publishers to help resurrect their fumbling classifieds operations. (It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, too, of course.)

How’s that? A newspaper’s classifieds website could expand its reach to search across multiple sources of ads, beyond what it may already be doing.

Sites like Oodle.com already work with some newspaper websites, which can add the ads that Oodle aggregates from 80,000 websites (filtered by location) to the newspaper website’s own ads, and the newspaper gets an additional revenue stream. The newspaper industry already curates some categories of ads with its jointly owned services like Careerbuilder, which gives one newspaper website’s readers access to job listings from all the other papers in the network as well as many niche websites.

But consider that some categories of classified ads are pretty much dead from a revenue perspective — with Craigslist dominating in some categories and effectively forcing newspapers to give away free ads. (E.g., look at your local Craigslist for a bicycle for sale and at your local newspaper’s classifieds; the paper’s bike listings are probably scant.) So for such categories as general merchandise, curating for classified ads from other sources can grow the utility of a newspaper’s classifieds website, by keeping ad readers from having to go elsewhere when they don’t find what they want with the newspaper site’s ads.

Where newspapers need to get creative is curating ads from other sources. Pull in RSS feeds of ads from, for example, bike shop or cycling club websites; if free Craigslist ads are killing your apartment-rental ads, look for sources of ads like university housing websites. If they’re no longer spending money with you for newspaper ads, bring in the ad feeds from housing rental services to beef up the quantity of ads that apartment seekers see on the newspaper website. Then sell contextual display advertising around the enlarged sections of free ads.

Since many newspaper publishers have been forced to give away ads free in some categories, they’ve had to resort to treating the ads as content and selling ads around them. (There are also upsell opportunities.) But that strategy won’t have much success if your free-category ad quantities are 1/10th that of the local Craigslist site. Aggregating or curating ads from external sources can solve that problem.

(As for ads placed directly with the newspaper classifieds, they of course can get top placement or highlighting. External ads will be credited to the source, linking back to it.)