4 ms·

Lot of newspapers in the US used to rely on money through classified ads but that was taken over by Craigslist. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-c

• shiroiushi 2y ago
  Craigslist is largely a ghost town these days: a lot of that stuff has moved to Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, etc. for selling stuff, and dating apps for the "personals" stuff. Basically, decades ago before the internet, newspapers served a role in facilitating communication between strangers, in a rather poor fashion. Individuals didn't have the money to have their own printing press and distribution system, so they had no way of contacting people unless they already knew their telephone number, or knowing what others had to offer. So newspapers had the "classified ads" section so people could spend a small amount of money and run a very tiny ad in the weekly newspaper for others in their town to see, and it was easy for the newspapers to just add a few extra pages with this stuff at the end. The internet simply made this all obsolete. If the newspapers had been really forward-thinking, they would have created first the social network services and become dominant there before MySpace, Digg, and Facebook came along. But it took them ages to even start thinking about anything besides a business model dependent on printing newspapers.