For over five years, I covered the classified advertising business for AIMGroup.com. I was the beat reporter for real estate and automotive, and I chronicled hundreds of companies – from startups such as Zillow and HotPads – to established classified pure plays including Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Cars.com.
We covered social media extensively, but the main story was how newspapers had let these online competitors, not the least of which was Craigslist, decimate their classified advertising business, (hence leading to the dire straights print papers are in today) and what they could do to recover.
An often told if somewhat apocryphal story is how the Boston Globe once had the opportunity to buy recruiting powerhouse Monster.com but declined, saying in essence “hey, we’re the big bad Boston Globe, we don’t need that little pitzkele site.”
If watching the classified advertising shake down is of interest, I recommend you visit AIMGroup.com. In the meantime, I present you here with links to some of my more evergreen blog posts for the site over the last couple of years.
There are a lot of links, so I’ll publish these in two posts – here’s part one.
Thanks for permission to post these from my erstwhile editor Jim Townsend and publisher Peter Zollman.
If the NYTimes dropped print and distribution and gave all its subscribers e-Readers, it would actually save money!
Short attention span theater: new data – 10 percent of viewers leave an online video within 10 seconds.
85% of Gen Y-ers participate in social networking. Do you?
“Digital immigrants” vs. “digital natives” – with Facebook, you’ll never have to “get back in touch” again.
Google to newspapers: “grow up” (it’s not that hard to block Google indexing).
Profile of 2 Israeli startups shaking up writing and news: Iamnews and WeBook.
10 tips on how to make hyperlocal work.
If you want to trash your ex online, do it in Texas, not Colorado.
Teens don’t tweet. How come? Here’s what a teenage analyst has to say.
Consumers will pay 62% of what they pay for a print newspaper to access online news sites.
Why international users are draining Facebook’s coffers.
Creepy hookups – Google Maps and Craigslist personal mashup.
Social networks trump email for content sharing.
It’s not the newspapers, it’s their owners for print’s problems.
The first all-tweet newspaper – social media vanity press? Meanwhile, blog-to-print newspaper fails.
More next week…