Newspapers can't make themselves as simple as craigslist
Wired's Gary Wolf follows up yesterday's story on craigslist's unrelenting simpleness with a story about how bad newspapers are at attaining the simplicity and usefulness of craigslist, even when they explicitly set out to do so. It's a good look at how some organizations are constitutionally incapable of changing in fundamental ways, even when they recognize that they must.
But advertising and upselling are not promising ways to support what Jacobson, et al, confidently call a "craigslist killer." Advertising on classifieds puts the newspaper in direct competition with its users, and creates an environment in which the classifieds are swamped by blatant, cheesy come-ons from paid advertisers trying to distract buyers. The image below is the from the apartments-for-rent page at the Bakersfield Californian, one of the papers that has tried this approach. What you see here is nearly the entire visible section of the page on a reasonably large laptop screen.The Craigslist Credo: Bad Advice for Newspapers
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Three words: "Design by committee."
One example of a TV station that has really good classifieds on their web site, KSL.com in Salt Lake City. Even with the adcrap on the right side, the site is snappy and really easy to use
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=13
It seems so easy though to say "just keep it simple" while still having enough ads around to support the site but I know I couldn't design my way out of a paper sack. Simple is tough sometimes.
Newsday just did a redesign which killed the site for me. It looks like a automatically generated spam page to me now.
If you think THIS is bad, take a look at the "Albany Times Union"... timesunion.com
designed by committee?? Designed by idiots, more likely.
I've been ranting about this regarding the Austin TX paper for nearly 10 years. During this time, they've had a date "search" function in their classifieds that hasn't worked for the ENTIRE time- nearly 10 years of not working! I'm not making this up. Every time they tweak the classifieds code they make it more complicated and difficult to read, and yet never ever have they attempted to fix that date-search bug capability, yet it cannot be difficult, what- like 10 minutes of debugging? I have emailed them about it too, they just don't care. Their classifieds have utterly DIED devastated kaput. Duh. Not surprising. They don't get it at all, it astonishes me, but that's ok, I just use craig's list like crazy, the local paper's already lost the race.
At least among the people who use Craigslist's for-sale pages, they are people who buy and sell used things. So it's likely that they will own older computers which can turn a site with all the modern bells-and-whistles into a "Waiting for doubleclick.com" nightmare. Craigslist, on the other hand, doesn't appear to even have a style-sheet, much less Ajax, or even JavaScript which makes it relatively snappy on even an old computer.
Let me come at this from the other angle, too: while Craigslist is not a couple people working in their basement, Wikipedia (for lack of a source in Wired; tired of reading) reports 32 employees. THIRTY-TWO. How would a monolith like a newspaper survive? They'd need 32 employees to serve one city. The trouble is that people still want their jobs, and making a complex, bloated website is one way to ensure it takes 32 people to run one city's classifieds. Nobody in a corporation would make a decision that would make their whole department obsolete in a year.
Craigslist grew to the size it needed to be; newspapers (or any organization) cannot shrink to the size they need to be.
Just for comparison, the most similar site here in Norway is owned by a coalition of newspapers. It's not as sparse as craigslist, but fairly convenient; I used it to find my current apartment.
Google translate has gotten quite good, so you can check the housing or stuff for sale page for an idea.
There is actually a craigslist Oslo, but last time I looked it had next to no traffic.
As a followup to my previous comment, finn.no has 220 employees for a country of under 5 million people. Some of those work on the underlying tech, which is licensed to several similar pages in other countries - but they still have significantly larger expenses than craigslist.
It seems to work for them, though: In 2007, the average Norwegian used 10 hours/year on their site, and I get the impression they make a tidy profit.
Now, this is a small country, but it's sufficient as an example that the newspapers can manage, if they think fast. (By now, it's probably too late to displace craigslist even if they create a good alternative.)
Let's not forget that everything on craigslist is an advertisement, same for the various "classified ads" mentioned - the difference is purpose of the ads. While all the ads are there to generate revenue for the sponsor, some are there to attract the reader, others are there to exploit the reader - the issue is balancing the exploitation with the attraction.
Many conventional web sites were given gobs of money and a fairly reasonable window to generate revenue for the investors, while I suspect that newspapers are slamming "exploitation" ads down the throats of the readers due to the demands off generating revenue NOW, as their sponsor organizations are losing revenue. It is this hand-to-mouth existance that is causing them to squeeze their handful of sand ever harder, causing more sand to spill out...
The answer? Newspapers need to lower their immediate expectations and learn from US radio stations - often-times, when a radio station changes format they go "commercial free" for an extended period, usually timed to culminate around Arbitron ratings, to establish their audience, then they slowly work ads into the programming, much like the famous "how to boil a frog" instructions.
Printed classified ads were a pricing anomoly, generating an unusually large portion of a Newspaper's revenue in comparison to the other forms of advertising (what is the revenue of a full page of classified ads vs. a full page ad?) Classified ads require more labor than a single, full page ad, but I seem to recall their revenue more than made up the difference.
Printed classified ads appear on your door step every morning (or you pick them up at the coffe shop/etc.), so the convienience is huge, compared to an online site (like a newspaper classified ad site) - the online site, while easy to access, is competing for eyeballs with eBay, Amazon, realtor web sites, auto dealer websites, etc. All are just as easy to access, and with their scale the more established competitiors are more likely to satisfy your needs on your first visit. Put simply, size matters, and most newspaper websites aren't big enough.
Long before Craig's List there was the bulletin board at the Berkeley Coop store and also the Berkeley Barb.
We had a car to sell. The Sunday newspaper classified ad got a few calls. The 3x5 card at the Coop sold the car.
The Barb was a classified gold mine. Usually in the top half of the first column, week after week, was an ad, "Girls liking French love call Ralph" followed by his phone number. You could count on seeing it there. I hadn't gotten a Barb for weeks but the next one I looked at had an ad one column over that said, "Girls liking French toast call Randy." followed by his phone number. Ralph never advertised again.
Long before Craig's List there was the bulletin board at the Berkeley Coop store and also the Berkeley Barb.
Or for rentals and roommates, Community Rentals on Castro Street, where nervous new arrivals from the Midwest had to sit next to leathermen and drag queens while perusing share rental listings.
OK, so, as a Bakersfield Resident, I love that the Californian is used as an example here.
I hate that it's bad enough to warrant use as an example, but it's fun to see your home town in a boingboing article, anyway.
I wonder if newspapers could use a business model similar to ebook readers to boost subs. I mean, the whole physical newspaper model is dying out, they need a new model if they want to stay relevant. Why not provide subs with automatic updates of articles, video, etc, with easy to submit letters to the editor, talk page, etc. Sell the device, make the basic news articles free, sub for the more advanced stuff like the talk pages and the like.
I'd buy it, as long is it was pocket sized, and especially if I could store ebooks on it as well. I'd pay a few bucks a month for a sub, particularly if I could access it on my pc and smart phone either instead of or as well as on the device.
The costs associated with switching business models seems high, but the costs of upkeep are much lower than the current model, and are quite likely to bring in far more revenue.
Ah, it's good to see the hometown fishwrap featured on the 'boing. The Californian is definitely suffering -- they shut down their local printing plant awhile back, and outsourced it to a press in Las Vegas if I remember correctly. They've also been shedding jobs at a quick pace from the editorial floor.
The latest experiment by the Californian is to switch to a tabloid format except for weekends. They may as well admit defeat and stop publishing a print edition altogether, as the dead tree edition is even more worthless than the online version.
Meanwhile, advertisers are clearly willing to pay for space in the various free auto-shopper and pennywaster type rags, which expand as the Californian shrinks. The only thing keeping it going now, I think, are those legal ads announcing imminent foreclosure, the only growth industry these days here in the Big Bake.