While surfing through clickz I saw a post about the future of classified ads. The title is"Bye-Bye classifieds". It focuses on Jeff Jarvis' opinion that as a result of new deals that have surfaced between Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace with various web classified partners, traditional classified ads in newspapers will be history. The author of the post creates several valid reasons why Jarvis' opinion may be wrong. First he argues that there are already systems that aggregate classifieds, and also with the use of widgets people can create custom listings for their own site. He also adds that newspapers are working on incorporating social tools on their websites. Adding to that, with their increasing use of social tools they can surely distribute paid and free listings in a contextual manner. This post also mentions that companies like google and yahoo are setting up specific divisions in order to help newspapers to create new listing models and to find more revenue streams.
I think this article is very relevant to almost everybody. Who at one time or another has not searched for something in the classifieds. It does seem like newspaper classifieds are dwindling with the capabilities of creating customizable listings on the internet. I believe that the effect of web classifieds on newspaper will be almost identical to the transformation from traditional news outlets to customizable aggregate news on the internet. While news is far more sophisticated on the web, consumers are still reading traditional newspapers for their coverage. As the use of traditional news outlets become obsolete, that is when the traditional classified ads in the newspaper will stop.
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