Visualizing Print Classifieds’ Decline

Pete Flint on the Trulia blog presents the loss of real estate ad dollars to print newspapers in graphical terms that illustrate how dire it is:

Source: Trula, NAA data

This entry was posted on September 9, 2008 at 7:26 am and is filed under Newspapers, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Visualizing Print Classifieds’ Decline”

Tim Cohn Says:
September 9, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Are real estate classified ads now obsolete? Any classified ad data for jobs or autos?

What categories do newspapers have left?
Greg Sterling Says:
September 9, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Not much sadly, although there’s still a great deal of money there: http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx
Tim Cohn Says:
September 9, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Largest year over year % contraction in 57 years of data?

Still $14 Billion spent annually.
Dave Oremland Says:
September 9, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Awesome data from both the Trulia and naa sources. Real estate newspaper spending is below the level of 1996. I can’t help but think that some of it is because the real estate depression hitting the nation, including a loss of people, income into the industry, etc.

The classified print info over time is interesting in this regard. It took percentage drops in the early 1990’s and early 2000’s. That suggests to me that employment is a BIG part of it, and with a drop in hiring came a drop in employment classified.

Finally, I found the data at the tail end interesting. Newspaper websites’ classified advertising in no way compensated for the loss of print advertising.

Craigslist has to be the gargantuan category killer. It is essentially free and/or dramatically low cost and it works. I’ve read it is hitting website classified sites these days.

How can you compete when one incredibly successful source offers the service virtually free.

Having a successful free source of advertising means businesses can pocket the money, spend it on other advertising, invest it elsewhere. Whatever they are doing….they are moving it out of print.

Wow!!!!
Pete Flint from Trulia.com Says:
September 9, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I was interested in the other categories myself and added them to my personal Trulia blog.
http://www.trulia.com/blog/pete_flint/2008/09/getting_out_of_newspaper
Paints an unpleasant picture – the combination of changes in media consumption and the economy is a 1, 2 punch.