Without Online Classifieds, Online Ad Spending Was UP in 2009
Classifieds? Classifieds! The word moves into creaking anachronism year by year.
While in 2006, “online classifieds” made up 18% of overall online ad spending in the U.S., the just-released data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that they just now make up just 10%. And that’s down from 14% in 2008.
In fact, if you parse the numbers, overall ad spend in the U.S. would have been up in 2009 – a year wracked by near Depression that saw print and broadcast advertising drop by 20% and more. Online classifieds lost $920 million year over year; overall digital ad spend was down about $700 million.
So online ad spending pulled off a coup, staying just about even in the worst ad year in memory.
The classifieds downturn is partly explainable by simple buying patterns: miniscule hiring, a semi-frozen real estate market and stop-and-go car buying. Even, in recovery, though, “classified” is not coming roaring back. As I talk to publishers from coast to coast, they tell me they see some glimmers of recruitment hope. Real estate is still largely mired in foreclosure. Auto shows some signs of forward movement.
Overall, they are budgeting classifieds in 2010 – against the awful 2009 comparisons – just north or south of flat. Undoubtedly, the classified trade will pick up some, as normal buying patterns re-emerge, but no one expects a robust return of the classifieds business, online or in print. In fact, in areas like auto, sites are finding that Yahoo behavioral targeting, provided through the Newspaper Consortium, may be a better online moneymaker than auto classifieds listings products.
Classifieds, of course, were the original bundled source of online revenue, in newspaper companies’ early digital days. At Knight Ridder, as was common among our peers, we attributed a small percentage of the overall, print-centric buy to “online,” usually in the single digits. “Bundling” provided much of the go-go growth of the middle of the last decade. Now, we see many of the newspaper companies moving, finally, away from bundling. McClatchy’s been the most vocal about its online-only sales, but companies from Scripps to Media General have recently been changing intra-company accounting to reflect the new realities.
Those realities: agencies and merchants are buying digital advertising on its own merits, and classifieds are fading slowly into history.