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

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.

I think it has been said and everyone now gets it that traditional sources of news have got to e-enable themselves in order to stand a chance at competing. Newspapers get that - The issue newspapers are faced with now is what to do once with the site once it has been built? In essence – ‘How do we drive traffic to our site?’ It should first be said that there aren’t too many publishers asking this question, as many of them rely on organic search terms to get by – and of course – focusing organically does not foster growth. However, there are few who understand e-sales and the value of creating a massive marketplace online for the benefits of buyers, sellers and information gatherers.

I performed random searches for things that newspapers generally target as their big verticals. The results confirmed that newspapers have not been doing all that they can to optimize their sites and as a result, are missing the opportunity to expand their marketplace.

• Apartments for Rent in NY – Kijiji appeared five times in the first two pages, but no New York Times.
• Used Cars LA – Kijiji again had dominant listings, but no LA Times or even Auto Trader
• Used Cars Toronto – A newspaper site (Wheels – Toronto Star) appeared on the second page of my search results.

The test could go on and on, but the point is the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality has the potential to cripple even the most web savvy publisher, very quickly.

From what we can see today, search engines are looking at ways to better the search experience through personalization. To a publisher or site owner, this means there should be less reliance on someone Googling your business name as opposed to your products. In order for search results to work for you, you need to start thinking like the customer and include Meta Tags that are relevant in likeness to the terms a customer would use, while performing a search. You should also be thinking about your site architecture and decide on the pages or content you want measured, read and trafficked – You should optimize those pages as well.

If this seems daunting, there are services that can help you. You can reference the service of a search-marketing agency and they will not only consult on SEO (search engine optimization), but also SEM (search engine marketing). If you think you can handle it yourself, use a robust reporting source like Hitwise to keep current on how people in your marketplace are searching for the items or services you offer, as well as see how your competitors are stacking up in regards to search.

The findings from a study performed by Penn State’s Dr. Jim Jansen and Amanda Spink, earlier this year, summarizes it best:

• Half of all users entered only one search query.
• 54 percent viewed just one page of search results per visit to the search engine.
• Searchers typically visit only the top three search results.
• About 55 percent of users checked out one result only.
• Only 19 percent went on to the second page.
• Fewer than 10 percent bothered with the third page of results.
• More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results

Hitwise is reporting that the Nintendo Wii is the leading search for shopping and classified sites, accounting for 0.19% in the category.  Nintendo has been struggling worldwide to maintain inventory of the Wii and many times brand new consoles are being sold a premium on classified sites.  Other popular search items were “apple ipod”, “ipod” and “iphone”.

If your a classified site opperator you can use this information to help drive traffic to your site.  If you have advertising focused on the Wii or the Apple iPod products make they are being found by search engines ( like Google ) and customers can easily find these sections.

Techcrunch is reporting that Edgio, a start-up focused on syndicating classified listings.  Throughout the summer the company was continually launching new services to syndicate classified listings, most of them without a strong monetization strategy.

No word on the Edgeio.com site about the shutdown or plans to liquidate assets.

Autotrader in Canada has revamped their cover with the help of Lucie Lacava, a well known magazine designer. This is second major overall of the Autotrader magazine design since the Yellow Pages Group purchased the brand in 2006. The cover maintains the Autotrader signature red masthead and continues with the ‘Come meet your match’ tag line that was introduce last year. The new design can be seen here, with the press release here.

While the new cover looks create in the design mock-up its not clear how it will work on the street. Most of the Autotrader magazines generated significant revenue from selling the cover as a premium ad unit and this might the sleek design in competition with revenue. The announcement did not include details on which regions have already deployed the new magazine design or if the design would also apply to the Hebdo line of magazines in Quebec.

Disclosure: I worked for the Yellow Pages Group from Feb 2006 to Jun, 2007.