Zillow announced this morning that a consortium of 11 print newspaper publishers (representing 282 newspapers) are syndicating their real-estate listings to Zillow:
Hearst Newspapers; Lee Enterprises, Incorporated; Media General, Inc.; MediaNews Group, Inc.; Morris Communications Company, LLC; Paddock Publications, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The E.W. Scripps Company, Times-Shamrock Communications and The Day Publishing Company.
Many of these folks are also in the Yahoo! consortium. Again this is the newspaper industry diversifying (hedging where Yahoo! is concerned) and finally recognizing that it has to syndicate its content out because its sites are not driving sufficient traffic and page views by themselves.
The program will launch in 2008 and allows those sellers listing their ads in print newspaper classifieds to have those listings included in Zillow. Newspapers become a sales channel for Zillow and Zillow extends their reach and makes advertising in print newspaper classifieds sexier.
Print real estate classifieds have been hard hit by the subprime mortgage crisis and housing recession. But print classifieds have seen double-digit losses this year:
Screenwerk 
November 14, 2007 at 1:32 am
So, if print is declining how will making the price of the ad with the inclusion of zillow increase the volume of print? Why wouldn’t Realtors just go to zillow? Isn’t the problem with this deal that it still forces a print buy when many Realtors would rather do without print and are successfully selling homes with less print marketing?
November 14, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Yes, theoretically they could just go to Zillow. But a large number of realtors aren’t substituting online for print, despite the consumer shift to the Internet. In this sort of deal, the familar newspaper channel becomes a “gateway” to Internet marketing.
November 14, 2007 at 4:29 pm
[…] Local Headlines Zillow’s Big Newspaper Deal […]
November 14, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[…] more coverage at : Screenwerk Posted in […]
November 20, 2007 at 10:16 pm
[…] spoke yesterday with Zillow’s CFO/VP of Marketing Spencer Rascoff. We talked about their newspaper deal and he disputed my characterization of the newspapers’ deal with Zillow as a […]
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