joe michaud
Calling all classifieds makeovers!
We’re attempting to round up all the recent activity around newspapers’ classifieds for an upcoming article.
Some papers are remaking or redesigning sections, some are dialing back days of the week when classifieds publish, others are restructuring sales forces.
Many of these moves are in response to the current economic climate, reducing expense to match reduced revenues. Certainly some are repositioning to capture more revenue, and we want to hear about those also.
Is your newspaper taking a new look at the print classifieds, or do you know someone we should talk with? If so, let us know.
Post a response here on this blog, or feel free to contact me privately at joem@aimgroup.com or call 207-253-9716.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Court rules against using newspaper for legal notice, but impact unclear
What’s hot? Jobs sites
It should come as no huge surprise that the economic downturn has led to a surge in activity on jobs sites.
According to comScore, uniques on job sites grew 51 precent from December 2007 to December 2008.
CareerBuilder.com Job Search led the category with 9.1 million visitors, up 78 percent versus year ago, followed by Monster.com Job Search* with 6.7 million visitors (up 62 percent) , Yahoo! HotJobs Job Search with 5.6 million visitors (up 146 percent) and Indeed.com Job Search with 5.1 million visitors (up 88 percent). SimplyHired, Inc. had the strongest growth rate of the top ten sites in the category, growing 161 percent to 3.1 million visitors.
ComScore tends to take the high-level view, so we’re not seeing data on regional sites, industry-specific boards and the like. But it’s safe to say everyone is seeing a surge in traffic.
At the same time, it’s likely these boards are seeing a drop in revenue as employers find themselves in a buyer’s market when they do have openings, and spending less time and money on posting jobs everywhere.
How should the smart job board respond? By becoming indispensible to those jobseekers. Many are in the open job market for the first time, in a career of relatively easy moves from job to job.
This is the time to make an impression and create a customer-for-life. Some ideas:
-Position as the most comprehensive source of jobs in a region, a category or any other criteria that has a lot of activity. This may mean scraping openings off employers’ sites.
-Pump up resume services and advice
-Host or sponsor networking events
-Other ideas? Share them below
The job market will turn at some point (hopefully soon) and when it does, the boards with the most valuable and loyal users will be the ones that get employers’ business.
Darwin putting a bullseye on media?
Noted venture capitalist and prolific blogger Fred Wilson answers five questions on Barry Graubart’s Content Matters blog, including this provocative idea about one impact of the economic downturn:
Every industry that is based on knowledge or information or some other form of non-physical matter (atoms vs bits) is going to fundamentally transform and this downturn will be the darwinian forcing function. Think about energy and power systems, banking, media, education. They all have that aspect to them.
I’ll throw out another unifying aspect: they’re all traditionally hierarchical institutions. In the past, their power in society came from their accepted roles as keepers of the truth. The breaking down of these towers of power has been happening in various degrees since the 1960s. Think about the “alternative press” and “alternative education.” Technology certainly has accelerated the process of disrupting the traditional institutions, especially since the Internet came along.
So for media, that means a perfect storm of social disruption, followed by technology disruption and now economic disruption.
Who will survive? If this is truly a Darwinian shakeout, then the surviving fittest will be those most suited to the new environment: non-hierarchical, technology-optimized, economically diversified.
Hulu’s approach to video ads
I had my first exposure to NBC’s Hulu.com video service last night. I’d been aware of it, of course, but hadn’t had a good reason to try it. Well, my Tivo missed last week’s episode of The Office, so there you go.
I was intrigued by Hulu’s approach to ads. On starting the show, I was shown a static screen explaining that this episode was sponsored by the Air Force, “with limited commercial interruptions.” It was too brief to bother skipping over. Then the show started, and at the first commercial break, there was a 10-second — yes, 10-second — commercial, very well done, with a countdown in small type at the top of the screen telling me the show would resume in 10 seconds, 9 seconds, etc. At the next break, a different commercial, this time 15 seconds, again very well done for such a brief format. Then a 20-second commercial near the end, and finally a 30-second ad in that slot just before The Office gang come back for their typical ending zinger.
So a couple of observations. First, I like the idea of using very brief spots until the viewer is hooked into the show. Second, the countdown is ingenious. In essence it’s telling me that by the time I figure out how to skip past that commercial, it will be over. Third, the creative in the ads was excellent. I found them simply enjoyable to watch, so I wasn’t hitting fast-forward to skip them. And then saving the full 30-second commercial until near the end means I’m already in the groove of letting the commercials play, so I get the full Air Force pitch.
For media companies like TV stations, newspapers and pure-play content producers, figuring out how to “monetize” video is an ongoing puzzle. Hulu shows one approach: keep the interruptions brief, for one thing. Make the ads enjoyable. They don’t need to be funny — the Air Force ones certainly aren’t. And maybe more importantly, make the content compelling enough to make the viewer want to see what’s next, after the ad.
That latter point could be the crux of the problem. Monetizing video — like The Office — isn’t so hard if it fully engages the viewer. Is the video on most media sites compelling enough to withstand a 10-second commercial?
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