| I disagree that online classifieds have diminished in value and usage. Almost all of their functionality has been replaced by something else that is still heavily used. Facebook Marketplace is huge. eBay is huge. Autotrader is huge. Poshmark is huge. Backmarket and Swappa are big too. People definitely buy stuff second hand, especially automobiles, which were a huge classified and advertisement pillar of newspapers (local dealership ads took up whole pages with listings of specific cars in their inventory!) A lot of what you’re saying about content being a race to the bottom is true, there was a paywall catch-22 where you needed site traffic from Google but you needed the paywall to get your subscription revenue. Your three pillars of revenue were classified ads, advertisements, and subscriptions. You could only choose one of two for advertisements and subscriptions thanks to the Google aggregator effect (either get clicks with no subscription revenue or get subscribers but no clicks), and classifieds were a lost cause. Outlets like NYT figured out how to create new revenue pillars, but that doesn’t really work for small regional outlets. You also had the problem where local newspapers used to re-print national news stories from other outlets but their role in doing so became worthless. |