RefreshClassifieds

Autotrader.ca has launched a New Car search and Autotrader New Car publication. Autotrader.ca is the number one automotive site in Canada with 2 million unique monthly visitors and it makes sense that they would expand into the New Car category. The Autotrader New Car magazine will be distributed in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Montreal with 230,000 copies in circulation.

Autotrader Canada has traditionally been a used car source and the brand took over the automotive classified advertising space in many Canadian markets. Newspapers and other media outlets have been forced focus on New Car advertising revenue, and done fairly well off the automotive manufactures.

The Autotrader.ca New Car offering appears to be positioned at giving automotive manufactures more choice with regards to advising. Currently the New Car search is separated from Used Cars but its not clear that consumers make a hard distinction between New and Used when they start searching. In most cases the price point of new cars puts them out of reach but with some incentive programs the cost for a new car is very close. In the future it new and used advertising may share more of the media outlets.

Disclosure: Colin Smillie worked with Trader Corporation in 2007, which owns Autotrader.ca.

Yellowpages Corporation is running a video contest for the funniest Canadian video and offering a $500,000 cash price and $500,000 charity donation.   The contest is part of the Yellowpages.travel site launch with positions Yellowpages Corporation in the travel industry.

Yellowpages.travel focuses on aggregating travel offers from a variety of sites.  Users can complete a single search and get results from :

• Expedia
• Travelocity
• Orbitz
• Priceline
• Kayak
• HotWire
• SideStep
• Hotels.com
• other major travel websites

This is a better experience for users since that don’t have to visit multiple travel sites and positions Yellowpages Corporation in a category where directories have traditionally not done well.

The Kelsey group released on the overall growth of the advertising market.   One of the most interesting aspects was the projection that Yellow Pages advertising would grow to $41.4 B, with a combination of the print and online sales.

Through 2007 to 2012 The Kelsey group predicts we will see the following:

• Local search revenues will grow from US$2.1 billion to US$6.6 billion (25.5 percent CAGR).
• Print Yellow Pages revenues will decline from US$27.5 billion to US$25.6 billion (-1.4 percent CAGR).
• Internet Yellow Pages revenues will grow from US$3.7 billion to US$9.2 billion (20.1 percent CAGR).

We don’t think there’s any surprise here in regards to the overall trends with print advertising declining and online advertising increasing.   Over a 5 year spread we would have though the divide would be greater though, with many consumers moving away from the print based directories.

One area of surprise was the Kelsey prediction that Yellow Pages print revenue in Canada would actually increase at 1.5%.  We have a hard time understanding this trend and suspect it might just be a revenue reporting issue with the Yellow Pages group in Canada that is distorting the values.

BusinessDirectoriez.com launched today with a focus on providing SEO links related to key topics to business sites.  While directories have long been a good source for quality SEO links we haven’t seen such an aggressive SEO focus before.  The sites lets business purchase links related to specific keywords.  For example “Motorcycle Trader” is one of the top links and actually links off to “www.usedmotorcycleforsale.ca”.

Pricing for links seems to be flat rates right now at $2 per link but the site pricing uses a bidding system.   Businesses will be expected to bid on popular keywords.  The Site also features deep links to increase your keyword ranking in search engines.

While the site is fairly well designed its not clear  how they hope to maintain any user traffic with the SEO business model.  Without some user traffic we don’t think it will be too long before search engines start to decrease the relevance of these links and the entire Business Directoriez.com site.

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

Just this past weekend I accompanied my brother to the dealership to pick up his new car and having just bought a new car myself two years ago, I assumed it would be as uneventful now as it was then. Surprisingly, what I experienced this time was nothing like the last, as I ventured down the path of Dealership Nouveau (that’s what I like to call it). While sitting with my brothers sales rep, here are a few of the things I found positively interesting, hence my need to blog about them:

Great Idea #1

You may or may not know this, but dealerships make their greatest margin from the service side of the business, and then used car sales and lastly new car sales. Recognizing this, this dealership invited my brother to come back to a ‘how to care for your vehicle’ workshop, hosted by none other than the dealerships service team. What a neat way to get you to feel valued by the dealership. That evening will also give the customer a chance to get to know the service team. We all agree that once you meet someone and they feed you, your affinity to that person increases. The event in its entirety, between staff OT and food for the guests, will probably cost that dealership less than $200. (One customers Type B maintenance on their car will more than pay for that.)

Source: NADA

Great Idea #2

The other thing that impressed me about this dealership was that they offered free WiFi to their customers. No more feeling as if you are missing those important emails at the office, while waiting for your car to have its oil changed. And, if your laptop is not WiFi enabled, no worries, the dealership also has Ethernet cables that will get you online.

Aside from the car clinic and free WiFi, the dealership was clean, bright and nicely furnished. The sales people were friendly and attentive – while we were waiting for our sales rep, we must have had three people ask if they could get us anything in the meantime.

All of this to say that this is what a dealership should be like. Providing a positive customer experience breeds further referral traffic. If your publishing product services auto dealers, a great idea would be to hold a dealer-training session covering lead sources, customer retention and the customer experience. If training is difficult to do because of the geography of your dealers, then create a white paper that is circulated to your dealers. Perhaps it goes out with their invoices or is downloadable from your site. No matter how you deliver it, this value ad from you will show that you not only know the business of selling cars, but that you also care about your dealers (customers) business.

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.

HGTV recently launched a new site called FrontDoor that is built on the concept of real estate services and fueled by property listings.

FrontDoor will be going head to head with Realtor.com and Zillow and Realtor.com, according to HitWise, was the most trafficked real estate site in the US, week ending December 8^th. So, competition will be tough for FrontDoor.

The HGTV real estate site launched with 1.2 million listings – not bad. Those listings however, are the result of current relationships Scribs HGTV has with aggregators of real estate listings and are not the result of organic growth.

FrontDoor is hoping that it will appeal to home seekers through their intuitive home-buying guides that are developed for the individual. They go as far as to create home buying tips for women, tips for those buying real estate with friends, foreclosure counseling and much more. They have tried to outwardly cover the services the other sites have not.

Given the turbulent times the American real estate market is going through, it is risky to launch another properties site, but if FrontDoor can leverage their services as their niche, it just may work.

The New York Post, one of oldest and fastest growing daily Newspaper publishers in the US with 4 Million monthly users, has partnered with Oodle, one of the largest online classified sites.  Oodle.com works by aggregating classified listings from a variety of sources so that users can get access to them on a single site.

It would appear that Oodle will provide a custom built classified site for the general classified listings.  The NYpost.com will continue to maintain separate classified listings for Automotive, Jobs, Real Estate and Dating.

The choice to use Oodle as a provider is an odd for the NYpost.com because Oodle aggregates all classified listings and it may now be possible for competitive classified listings to appear.  All listings in the general classified section will be free but this approach may drive traffic to competitive sites.   Its not clear if the NYpost.com and Oodle will actively filter competitive listings to avoid this problem.