Newspapers are hurting soooo bad, in both readership and revenues. Craigslist is killing their classified revenues, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it now looks certain that Google is getting into the act.
Classified Intelligence reports that “Google is aggressively moving to include classifieds listings in its organic search results,” requesting direct feeds of listings from various classified advertising Web sites. No big deal? Au contraire. Classified advertising is a $100 billion-plus industry worldwide. For a long time, newspapers enjoyed the lion’s share. But those days are over.
As Good Morning Silicon Valley put it, “Your search — ‘Newspaper classifieds revenue’ — did not match any documents.” (Ouch!)
Start a Google Alert for “For Sale: used printing press.”