RefreshClassifieds

Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., The New York Times Co., and Tribune Co. announced this morning the arrival of quadrantONE. quadrantONE is a new joint venture to sell national online advertising inventory across all of the web properties belonging to each of the participating publishers. The online market reach of Gannett, Hearst, NYT and Trib.’s new online network will be 50 million monthly unique visitors, across 27 US markets. Dana Haye, Interim CEO, quadrantONE, and senior vice president for sales of Tribune Interactive explained the benefit to advertisers by saying “Imagine placing the same ad across hundreds of local Web sites on the same day with one buy-that’s the power of this network.”

quadrantONE is undoubtedly the publishers push at retaining market relevance and combined dominance in the wake of pure play online competitors. If advertisers gravitate to the quadrantONE network and if managed accordingly by the publishers, it just might work.

According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the average number of unique monthly visitors (UMV’s) to newspaper websites grew by more than 3.6 million in 2007, making it a record year for the industry. The 2007 UMV figure is an increase of more than 6% over 2006 numbers.

Monthly unique visitors to newspaper websites averaged 62.8 million in Q4’ of 2007 and it was the largest quarter reported, since the NAA began tracking online usage in 2004.

Additional findings in the Nielsen Online report created for the NAA state that:

• Heading into the holiday season, newspaper websites experienced a record in October 2007. More than 63.2 million people visited newspaper websites that month, more than any month on record - and an 8% increase from the same period a year ago
• For the year’s fourth quarter, 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper websites, with visits averaging 44 minutes a month
• In the fourth quarter, users generated more than three billion page impressions on average, a 7.3% increase over the same period a year ago

The National Post released its new site design and the results are impressive. They have gone from the smaller text with gnawing prominent yellow, to larger images and lots of them, cleanly placed on the home page. The screen width in this newer sleeker post site has also grown, making the content images aesthetically pleasing. The site still, unfortunately, makes you scroll to infinity to get to the content placed at the bottom of the screen (all newspapers seem to be repeating this mistake). This just means that the Post could utilize links on their home page a little better.

What makes this re-vamp monumental for the National Post is that they have dropped the subscriber barriers. All of their content will be served, for free, online. The post will also look to include blogs for a more personal editorial take on news and current events.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), released a report on Friday, addressing Q2’ performance in the newspaper advertising space. The report features detail on the 19.3% increase seen in internet advertising revenues, during Q2’ of this year, versus the like in 2006. Even with the increase however, online advertising spend only accounted for 7% of all ad dollars taken in by newspapers. With that being said, online, no matter the advertising percentage, shows extremely well when compared to print revenues. According to the NAA, print revenues declined by over 10% in Q2’, when compared to last year and, as we guessed it, the biggest print decline is being seen in the classified ad sector. Classifieds themselves are down over 16%.

The results above are not surprising, if you have been watching how our larger advertisers are shifting their media campaign dollars. The next feat for newspapers and magazines is to figure out a way to be seen as a needed partner in that advertisers long term, new media plan. Determining the role they have to play, will allow for longevity and a way to capitalize intelligently, on online market opportunities.

Google has officially launched their Print Adwords for Newspapers today.  The service has been in beta for just under a year with a limited selection of Newspapers and advertisers.   While the service is not directly available for Classifieds, advertisers can purchase display advertising in the classified section.  Here’s the Google description:

Classifieds
Classifieds are short notices usually for offered services, business listings, items for sale, or ‘wanted’ ads. Classified ads generally appear in ads-only sections, grouped with other ads with similar content. Typically text-based, classified ads can consist of as little as the product or service’s title and a phone number. Google Print Ads does not currently accept classified ads, FSIs, or circulars – only run of press (ROP) ads.

I think the most interesting line is “Google Print Ads does not currently accept classified ads”. A little foreshadowing I think…

Newspaper Classifieds have been battling with free classified sites for years and many believed the worst had pasted. The Newspaper Association of America is reporting that Classified revenues are down another 13.2%. Within Classifieds the decline breaks as follows:

• - 14.2% in Real Estate advertising
• - 14.3% in Recruitment advertising
• - 20.1% in Automotive advertising
• - 0.5% in Other Classified advertising

There was some speculation that the American Real Estate market was further impacting the Classified decline but it would appear that Automotive and Recruitment have also been had a big impact.

Online advertising ( not exclusive to Classifieds Advertising ) has increased by 22.3% but has not offset the decline from Classified Advertising.

The revenue is certainly showing that Newspapers need to be more innovating with how they generate online revenue if they’re going to remain a dominate media source. Craigslist and other free Classifieds are here to stay. To compete the solution might be to use to free Classifieds a traffic draw to get users to interact with other aspects of the website.