Free classified ads

Sales of national and regional newspapers are in decline, yet the brand value and credibility of newspapers still remains high. Colin White, UK CEO of Oxygen8 Communications, believes that newspaper publishing groups have a fantastic opportunity to drive new revenues by moving to a free advertising model.

As with most traditional media, sales of national and regional newspapers are in decline. The old habits of reading the daily newspaper and watching the six o’clock news are dying out, as consumers now readily obtain news and other information on the web, and increasingly on mobile phones.

Yet the brand value and credibility of newspapers still remains high. In the digital world, newspaper publishing groups have a fantastic opportunity to drive new revenue streams, grow their share of audience and increase reader loyalty – but key to this is the ability to successfully commercialise their product offering.

With huge competition for advertising spend, the ability for newspaper publishers to offer a free advertising model to a strong user audience is compelling. Rather than charging the advertiser to place a classified ad in the paper, publishers can now deliver classified ads to consumers via mobile phones – with each responder paying a small charge.

This model also provides publishers with unprecedented access to customer information which can be used to support complimentary product and service advertising around the main advert, maximising revenues.

It is also important for publishers to recognise the growing demand for local information. This provides a new opportunity to offer location based services for local advertisers, enabling them to exploit the location of the mobile user or the use of local IP identification with the provision of real-time, personalised offers.

It is now up to the publishing companies to make the staff and operational changes required to maximise the new media marketplace. A failure to achieve this will simply result in further steep decline and publishers may well end up out of business.