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Craigslist has cost U.S. newspapers $5 billion since 2000, researchers say
- GuiA 13y agoThat's like saying that cars have cost horse carriage manufacturers $X billion. What a silly statement.
- dmak 13y agoCouldn't have said it better myself.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 13y agoExcept less useful, unless I missed the part where horse carriages had been in decline for years before cars existed because the dominant producers engaged in a series of corporate mergers and cost-cutting moves that stripped out the main customer value from the product. America's newspapers (particularly the big dailies) had been destroying themselves since about the early 1980s; the decline was well-known, and often discussed long before it started to be blamed on competition from the internet in general or Craigslist in particular.
- kansface 13y agoIts entirely reasonable to claim CL has transformed a billion dollar business into a million dollar business of which it (as a company) is the sole beneficiary. For quite some time, Newspapers and the like have not sold news- they sell used cars and real estate. Quantifying the actual numbers if valuable.
- GuiA 13y agoIt's reasonable to say that they have transformed the market, but saying they have "cost" them anything is an ill choice of words.
- smokeyj 13y ago> CL has transformed a billion dollar business into a million dollar business of which it (as a company) is the sole beneficiary And of course the value added to CL's users and the many markets it facilitates..
- ams6110 13y agoCars offered many advantages over horse carriages, enough that people were willing to pay for cars. Craigslist offered one main advantage over newspaper classifieds: they were free. It's hard to compete with free on something like a classified ad. If CL had charged anything close to newspaper market rates for ads, they would not have had nearly the market penetration.
- GuiA 13y agoAnd if newspaper ads were free, Craigslist wouldn't be where it is today. With ifs and buts we can change the world :)
- dobbsbob 13y agoNothing stopping media tycoons from making their own classifieds site. Village Voice did with Backpages
- BIair 13y agoCost per inch, classifieds were always a big rip-off. Worse? Obituaries. Now many papers charge a fee for print, plus a web fee. Adding insult to injury. Who's going to disrupt the obits?
- jlgreco 13y agoIn a world where people are increasingly connected to those that they care about, do we still need obituaries? They may become a thing of the past.
- meritt 13y agoFacebook via memorializing user accounts.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoYeah, and Twitter, g+, etc.
- epoxyhockey 13y agoForeclosure auctions have to be advertised publicly and the de facto standard is to publish in newspaper classifieds, too.
- jessaustin 13y agoOnly old people care about obituaries on a regular basis. When they start reading other media (actually, when people who read other media get old), newspaper obituaries will be disrupted.
- jlgreco 13y agoAlternatively, Craigslist has saved people $5 billion (minus fees for a few categories) since 2000.
- loceng 13y agoThis is how I was looking at it..
- michaelfeathers 13y agoI feel the same way. The headline should say: Technical progress and competition have cost U.S. newspapers $5 billion since 2000, researchers say
- jlgreco 13y ago"Failure to innovate damages industry Dinosaurs"
- if_by_whisky 13y agoIf you consider how much value craigslist creates, its so much more than $5B. Everyone who wasn't willing to pay for a newspaper ad plus the people that were add up to a lot of benefit. Its a ton of value. It doesn't go into GDP. But its still real value.
- cpolis 13y agoAnd saved people countless hours in waiting for their classifieds to get printed and effort in figuring out spacing and setting up their ads.
- adventured 13y agoFirst, the article is talking about data for 2000-2007 (so the title is a bit misleading). The prime collapse in the newspaper industry began after 2007. Second, if you ran it to 2013 it would clearly be at least several times $5b based on the spectacular collapse of the classified industry. Third, losing the lucrative classifieds business chopped the legs out from under newspapers, the net cost to them was much wider than just the raw classified business itself. As others have noted, Craigslist has saved people and businesses at least as much as they've cost newspapers. The efficiency gain alone of Craigslist is likely to have produced a significant net gain for the US economy.
- mindcrime 13y agoWhat a horrible headline. That makes it sound like US newspapers were somehow entitled to that $5 billion. In actual fact, the newspapers had the same opportunity as Craiglist to earn (or try to earn) that revenue, and they dropped the ball. Boo hoo, cry me a river. It should, instead, read "failure to adapt to new technology and a changing environment results in $5 billion loss to US newspaper industry". Or something roughly like that.
- reedlaw 13y agoI wouldn't mind if newspapers went out of business. Hopefully most of the industry's jobs could move online. And it sure would save a lot of paper.
- TylerE 13y agoThis is a very short-sighted view. Where do you think all those syndicated stories that fill every online news site actually come from?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoJournalists?
- TylerE 13y agoThat are paid by...?
- antsar 13y agoReuters, for example.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoSometimes they aren't[1]. Some are paid through agents. Those syndicates are missing their opportunity to organize and solve the journalists' coordination problems. Someone will. [1] - https://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-freelance-journalist-2013/ https://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-day-in-the-lif...
- reedlaw 13y agoDo you think those stories would disappear if newspapers were no longer printed? There are plenty of online news sites. The syndicates can keep selling their stories without printed newspapers.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoNewspapers forfeit $5 billion badly needed dollars to Craigslist by totally failing to notice how bad they were at their jobs, and how technology has changed information delivery. Continue to insist upon sending patrons pounds of waste paper every month.
- cenhyperion 13y agoLet's all sit around and cry about how new technology replaces old business models.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]