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How Craigslist Costs Newspapers Money
Allnighterking writes "Well you knew it would happen, Now that eBay has purchased 25% of craigslist, the news is out and suddenly newspapers are claiming that it's costing them money (50-65 million U.S. dollars a year). The original Slashdot coverage is here."
craigslist? ...
Oh.. and Go Josh! Woohoo! Congrats!
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Cry me a river. Out with the old, in with the new.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
With as connected a population as we have, I am suprised the numbers are not higher.
A recent study shows that craigslist has directly saved consumers 50-65 million dollars in advertising costs, and many more 10s of millions of dollars indirectly by enabling direct human-to-human transactions with a minimal effort.
Hmm...this Internet thing seems to be a disruptive technology...whoda thunk it.
newspapers, tv's gonna kill the newspapers, the internet is gonna kill newspapers now its one little corner of the internet is gonna kill the newspapers. They have done ok so far they have changed they have adapted just like the rest of us. Just as long as they dont try to patent the "Idea" of classifieds (newsprint is kinda like software right?).
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
They make insane commisions solely based on their monopoly. Their fees are insane, especially after they killed their competition. Their costs are nil, but their revenues are huge.
ever since it went online. I even sent them a note saying as much when I cancelled my subscription.
The point is?
This is kinda "dog bites man" ain't it?
.nosig
"now that eBay has purchased 25% of craigslist"
Must of got caught up in the heat of the auction, I heard they only wanted 20%.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
If newspapers weren't printed on paper they would save tons of money related to paper costs, printing etc. It's no wonder why Craigslist is so profitable.
That's how it is out there in the "real world". These papers should expand their online offerings. Or make something better that competes with Craigslist. Maybe a networked classified system for a whole metro area across all newspapers. But that'll never happen, since that would require cooperation.
I would have thougt a site named craigslist.com would be run by someone named Craig.
It's a free country, and EBAY (NASDAQ) is a publicly traded company. Or is that a sneer I heard in your voice?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
to jump on the RIAA/MPAA/AAA/*AA bandwagon and claim that the internet is ruining traditional sales? How are they calculating these numbers? Are they saying that these are lost sales from would-be listers? Hmph....
Ive seen plenty of papers with their own online classifieds...I cant see how theyd lose so much anyway. Its pretty easy to grab a newspaper/SuperShopper/free local classified-crap paper and hunt for what youre looking for. Ive had mixed success with Craigslist....YMMV
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
I can't wait for the NPIA (news paper industry association - there has to be one, right?) to start kicking in doors with the FBI trying to quash the rouge, free exchange of want-ads.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
There's nothing I've put on craigslist that I would have put in a newspaper. How could they be losing money?
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
What a bizarre way of looking at it. IMO a better way to look at it is "newspapers no longer extorting $65 million per year from local residents". Or "$65 million once wasted on newspaper classifieds now available for health, education, other productive uses".
Rather than Craigslist costing newspapers $65 million per year, I think the newspapers have been costing the local residents $65 million per year. Hooray for Craigslist. Boo to the newspapers.
Newspapers aren't trying to sue the smitherines out of Craigslist.
On Apple Input Peripherals: They're okay, I guess, but I was really hoping for a one-key keyboard and a 109-button mouse
but I think we're supposed to cry for Carrige Whip wholesalers or something....
Why? I have gotten tons of stuff off there. With the speed of the internet things remain up to date and communication is way better. While newspapers descriptions are limited to like 30 characters, but with craigslist there is virtually no limit...at all. Pictures, links, huge descriptions, anything you can think of. I have not looked at a newspaper classifed for a long time.
Any paper seriously threatened by Craigslist would have gone out of business thanks to the invention of toilet paper.
When I spend my money on your competition, it doesn't COST you money. You don't LOSE money when I don't give you MY money. You just don't GAIN money. Just because you USED to get my money doesn't mean you'll ALWAYS be able to count on getting that money. What part of "Past performance not indicative of future results" is so hard for you to understand?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This is all good news. It costs me like $400+ to put a tiny job classifieds ad in the local daily paper. What a ripoff - more than many small shops can afford. Craigslist is what - $75? It's called competition, and the print papers need a healthy dose of it.
The other other reason Craiglist does well is they produce results. I've used other online services to source out staff and contractors and gotten nothing but garbage. The two postings I've put on Craigslist in the past month have netted me numerous qualifed and experienced candidates.
Life Insurance in Canada
Slashdot is a website, and, by extension, a community of folks.
So it can't physically do what was suggested. Or, alas, even virtully do such a thing (involves sucking).
Good Day, Mr. Troll, try again.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The Internet pure play always beats the hybrid bricks + e-business because it has a clear strategy. The newspapers can't figure out how to continue to make money on their print editions if they give away the store online, so the on-line content and classifieds are almost never as complete, attractive, or interactive as they could be.
The WP had the right idea, by buying an existing Internet brand (Slate). I think the newspapers are better off buying into fledgeling Internet content sites than trying to start their own. And they need to provide at least nationwide coverage for classified ads.
Ever since my apartment complex (cheap 'ghetto' area of arlington, va, or at least the closest you get to a ghetto in arlington) advertised its apartments on CL they have been getting some young, attractive, american females.
I no longer have to ask "hablo ingles" when someone is stealing my socks in the laundry room!!.
No wonder the newspapers are losing money... have you seen how small the comic stripe panels are? Sheesh...
I find it annoying that some established businesses seem to view the continued patronage of their customers as an entitlement, even in the face of better, cheaper alternatives. It's not "costing [the business] money," it's consumers exercising the prerogative to which a free market entitles them. Instead of whining about lost revenue, perhaps these industries could adapt to the changing market, as they're supposed to in a capitalist system (*cough* RIAA *cough*).
Classified ads are being outsourced to teh intarweb. John Kerry has a plan to combat this reduction in newspaper jobs. Pls vote for him. kthxbye.
Thats rather sad really. They are claiming lost profit as if it is the fault of craiglist, not just them loosing out in competition.
When have you seen "LA Times blames NY Times for a 30 Million dollar revenue loss"? It makes no sense. It's a (mostly) free market, and Craigslist is in competition with the papers for it. Their model works better, so they get the traffic, and the newspapers dont.
They really have no place to whine here at all.
did radio claim massive damage from the rise of television in the 1940s?
...such as that which will remain unnamed, but insists that we keep on buying little shiny aluminum discs when we want to listen to music
what does the word "progress" mean to some people?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In these days businesses can not rest, they have to move with the times. In the old days you could have the same business plan for decades, but no longer.
Corporations seem to feel wayyyy too entitled to our money nowadays.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I'm not sure what the buy in by the den of theives has to do with this, but it's hardly a surprise that new and improved forms of communication have an impact on old, outdated and over priced forms of communication. This is news for nerds? It would be news if it didn't happen.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The newspaper lobby needs to pay off Congress to enact special legislation making Craigslist illegal. They could call it the NMCA (Newspaper Millennium Copyright Act).
I owe my current apartment, kick ass roommate, and my job all to Craig. If you are living in an urban area, you really can't go wrong. Let's hear it for grassroots, baby!
I think the real question is, how much has newspapers cost craigslist?
So when does one of these newspapers sue eBay for the money that Craigslist is costing them?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I work for a medium sized paper in their online division. I can't say this is anything of a surprise for us "New Media" guys. We've been trying for over a year now to get our classified department to allow online only ads, they just aren't interested.
I'll talk to them about craigslist or autotrader and they just look at me like I'm an alien. Most classified departments are run by old men without a clue.
As far as requiring registration, I absolutely hate it. It's got to be the most annoying thing we ever came up with. I voiced my opinion and we did it anyways. We're still seeing positive growth in our traffic, so they just aren't going to budge. The sad part is, all my paper is interested in is seeing that immediate buck from our website. It's just depressing because there are soo many free news sites out there that it's almost impossible to break even.
I don't plan on working there for long though, they just don't pay and could care less about your opinion unless your an editor. Screw the newspapers!
"Virus scanning companies are seeing a 65 million dollar windfall due in part to a contraction in the nation wide market for classified ads. Orignially, this improbably trend was linked to a slight reduction in the rates of infection of sexually transmitted disease. But new investigations have uncovered a hidden variable. Smelly, anti-social losers would rather get for free, in the flickering darkness of their computer rooms, and on-line things which previously would have required at least minimal interaction with other people and sometimes considerable sums of money.
lol. All in good cheer, mate.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Next, How Movies cost Vaudeville Money. 'nuff said.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Which has a link to a preview of the report (pdf); the price to buy the report is $250 - both of which can be found here.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
radio with pictures? bah! it'll never catch on! paperless news? bah! it'll never catch on! hey...wait.. where's my money?
You do not have a right to profits! Seriously, this is what an economist would call "competition." In capitalism, it is supposed to happen.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The article seems to imply that because of Craigslist's free nature, that the papers are losing money and can't compete with Craigslist persay. However, that isn't entirely correct.
I used to work at Trader Joe's in SOMA (SF) and had the fortune of having a Craigslist employee come through my line (he was wearing a CL shirt, which I inquired about). We got to the topic of Craigslist and its plethora of free boards/posting for all sorts of items. I asked how much bandwidth they were using (something like 20 MB per second at the time) and how they got their revenue since there weren't any advertisements on the site. The solution: They charge companies to post employment listings... and evidentially only for the San Francisco section of Craigslist. All the other cities sections were still completely free. (At least this was the case at the time I talked to this employee)
So while the newspapers are claiming they are losing that money to Craigslist (which is true), it's more of a fact that these companies are simply switching to a service that they feel produces better results, not neccesarily the fact that Craigslist is a (mostly) free service for them.
(Of course, it also helps that you can search job postings by location, money, job types, and other criteria... which isn't all that easy in a hard copy newspaper. It's simply a better medium)
(Offtopic - I've also had someone from Yahoo come through my line, who was also wearing a company shirt. After talking for a bit, she asked if I used Yahoo at all. I told her I used Google. She didn't say another word to me while she was in the store!)
Read your local lately? You'll find maybe ten percent new local content put alongside 90% of yesterday's wire service stories. This is just a transport mechanism for the dozens of advert flyers that are the real purpose of the paper. LET THEM DIE.
Internet news and classifieds can't be used to house train a dog and line bird cages. People will need news papers for some time to come.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What we're seeing now is the manifestation of the new mega-corporate business model.
At some point, if a company becomes large enough, it apparently is granted some form of "seniority" in the marketplace and is no longer required to be competitive. When these companies find themselves in such positions, in lieu of being innovative or fiscally responsible, many whine and complain that their right to profit (or as Noam Chomsky says it's spelled "jobs") should be protected. From airlines to car companies, this has been happening for decades. Taxpayers subsidize the slow death of badly run businesses.
The amount of "corporate welfare" in the form of various tax incentives and trade protection to mega-corporations is exponentially greater than all other entitlements combined, almost all of which are designed to give corporations advantages in lieu of being more competitive in the marketplace.
The funny thing is that if it were a smaller company complaining about waning competitiveness, people would be unsympathetic. However, larger entities seem to not have to play by the same rules.
Let this be a lesson to would-be entrepeneurs: If at some point you employ X amount of people and purchase Y amount of political clout, you no longer have to be that concerned with the viability of your products and services.
Every American who doesn't give me a dollar right now is costing me the dollar that I'd have if only they'd given it to me.
Thus, Americans' selfishness is currently costing me over $250 million a year, and that lost revenue has a real economic impact; it's money that would otherwise be flowing into the economy when I spent it on myself.
I think it's time that congress got involved.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Obviously they have changed the math curriculum this past decade, at least I learned that you can't calculate correctly with made up numbers.
Owners/managers/paperboys have learned from the likes of RIAA and MPAA that you make up losses (though they won't claim them on tax returns) and get away with it. Newspapers have been printing the results of such made up math for years now, why shouldn't they use it themself?
We will probably see legislation before the end of the year like: DMAPA (Digital Millenium Advertising Protection Act), CANTAD, APPA (Advertising Property Protection Act) and PERSUADE. If some industrys can get away with it, why not the newspaper industry aswell?
I'd hazard to predict that we will see a new term being used by the newspaper industry in 2005, "Advertising Property", and a new organization called WAPO (World Advertising Property Organization) and a new presidential office of czar of Advertising Property.
Although the article laments the loss of revenue, the study is for sale, and suggests it will teach its buyers how to cope.
What little I saw, had a rather pithy "adapt or die" admonition. It also listed four or five competitors to Craigslist, and suggested it saw holes in the Craigslist business, which offers opportunities....
Of course, the purpose of any press release is the sale of material, and here I am pitching it. :-(
Well, if you were in the newspaper business, it would probably be $250 not too badly spent.
To get back to my original point - the source material was "Yet another example of fundamental changes happening to some market segment," and how not to die like the dinosaurs. Of course, InformationWeek left off that last bit....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Your summery sucks.
InternetWeek, not InformationWeek.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
The moguls at several San Francisco Bay area Newspapers are stunned to hear from their consulting group this week.
"It's a disaster," says Eddie Plank, Cheif Editor of the Bayside Times. "it's as if there's a separate dimension where people are reading and posting their classified ads!"
Between $50 and $65 million has reportedly been lost from one site alone.
"We've lost over $10,000" says Robert Mullen, Editor of the Francisco Today. "But chances are this has no relevancy to you at all."
While growing up my parents got the daily newspaper. Fast-forward to now and I've got my own house and I don't buy a newspaper. Why? I can get the news quicker by going to espn.com or yahoo's news site.
I think what we're seeing here is an entire generation that will *NOT* be buying newspapers. I don't even get a subscription to sportsIllustrated which was something I did while growing up.
Looks like the print industry in general may be running into this problem that their audience doesn't want to wait for tomorrow to get today's news. Maybe if all news sites required me to pay (like NYTIMES) but then I'd just find another one (why do I have to pay to read a site AND still get advertisements in the page....
...as long as people still have pets.
On the other hand, when I get an Aibo, he'll have nothing to fetch, unless on yet another hand he can wirelessly fetch a copy of craigslist.
Take a look at the typical Sunday paper. It's 75% Ads. Then you get to the "writing" and a lot of it is subpar at best.
Tomorrow is the best day. It's like a Mini-Sunday paper with this ADVO Ad crap that they put in the paper, and then Mail it to you via USPS.
Seriously, I don't think these "Newspapers" are losing money. If they would consern themselves with writing and reporting well, they wouldn't have problems.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I even sent them a note saying as much when I cancelled my subscription.
...Which is why I my brain trys to throttle me when I think about how the NYT requires registration to read the articles. If I ran the NYT, I would be begging people to read articles without hassle on my site, as it would boost readership overall, and I could bill advertisers more. Stupid NYT..
You haven't cost them anything at all. The money you pay to have your paper delivered goes almost entirely to your paperboy/girl/whatever. Newspapers make money off of advertising. The greater their circulation, the more money their ads reach, and the more that they can justify charging for them. When I was a paperboy, I think I had to pay the newspaper about 1.50 of the 8.50 I collected for each regular customer I had. That probably just about covers their distribution infrastrusture costs.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I used to read the Mercury News (the local San Jose California USA paper) pretty much every day since I moved here in 1990. About 6 months ago I stopped almost completely.
I still buy the paper once a week on Friday. I keep the Frys advertising section and the entertainment guide and throw the rest out before I get irritated. I still read Gilmor (who's leaving next month) online.
The reason for this was the quality of their news coverage, not anything to do with Craigslist or the internet.
Now get over it!
In Other News:
That guy who got the sysadmin job I applied for has now cost me over $60,000CDN in lost income. Bastard!
And the cow-irker who works down the hall and purchased a computer from CompuSlut instead of me cost me another $250. Bastard!
And all those people who wanted holiday photos printed, and went to a "professional printers" instead of letting me charge them $20 per page to do it on my colour laser just cost me over $600! Bastard!
I mean, what do we think we are, a capitalist society here or something? I have a right to this money, and it is inherently wrong for anyone but ME to get it!
We all need to band together to ensure that EVERYONE has to pay whatever price I set for my services, because it is just WRONG for some new paradigm to come along and get the money, just because they happen to have a cheaper method of doing things. It's WRONG, I tell you, and we must FIGHT IT. Send a message to these bastards, and give me all your money!
Sincerely;
Cerv
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Craigslist's first and only official locale(so far as I know) is located in San Francisco, on 9th Avenue, south of Judah Street, in a small one-room property set below street level. The space was previously occupied some months prior by Ballpark Gaming Center(previously Ballpark Trading Cards), whose owner ran a fairly successful TCG/LAN shop but finally quit when rising rents made his commute too long.
Craigslist does not take visitors, but some awards are displayed outside and looking in, one may see a bunch of rigs humming away. (never saw a living person there)
Who cares? I don't get the point of this article. I'm glad the new is in, and the old are getting screwed. It's called progress.
Now these poor papers won't have any revenue from people seeing ads as they read "Why outsourcing and automation are good for you" articles.
Table-ized A.I.
Quick, let's make sure we pass some legislation that makes Craig's List illegal so we can prop up the profitability of antiquated business models.
Join Tor today!
Newspapers actually had useful content (such as news, rather than over-the-fence gossip), they'd probably be able to make money from sales, rather than advertising.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The real irony is that Craigslist tends to be, like Ebay (which was responsible for 3/4 of ALL internet fraud complaints), something you have to approach EXTREMELY carefully.
People on Craigslist tend to be really flaky- we're talking the stoned kind of flaky, or the "I'm going to try and cheat you because I think I'm clever" kind of flaky; I'm not sure which is worse. Then there are all the wierdos posting in the various personals section- if you want a great laugh (no matter your gender), read those sections; makes you think of someone walking into McDonalds with $2 and expecting a rare Filet Mignon with sauteed mushrooms. Or the ever popular "I'm hot. Send a picture. Sexiest one wins." I laughed for about 5 minutes so hard I couldn't breathe, and resolved never to look in w4m again because it was dangerous to my health, even if it was a fantastic laugh.
Top problem though, is that people are complete IDIOTS when it comes to listing their items. "Printer. Best offer." Inkjet? Laser? Dot matrix? Made this decade? God forbid they tell us what company made it. I also love it when useless, worthless stuff is offered up- like cheapo computer speakers. People, I'm all for the recycling bit, but take that shit to the RECYCLING CENTER, don't waste anyone's time putting it up for sale for $5. Round trip subway fare costs at least half that...
The hysterical bit is that Craiglist supposedly has an "advisory committee" that handles how the site is presented to users. When I complained that even basic instructions were never shown to users as part of the posting procedure and it was clear there was a problem, Craig just replied, "thanks, the committee will think about it".
Then there are the people who post the "free" iPod/plasma/whatever emails (which are usually flagged by the community)...the problem is that there's nothing to keep them from posting over and over, because (to my knowledge) there is no automatic blacklist after X number of posts flagged...so spamming is pretty easy.
Then there are the ripoffs. Go read your city's /sys/ for a few minutes, and see how many times you say "WHAT?!"...like people asking $500 for a Pentium 3 system. Go read /ele/ and see how many times you see "Theater Research" speakers being offered for $500; the more honest (or naive) ones admit to buying it from some guys in a white van...the others just think "oh well, I'll get some other sucker to buy 'em".
Classic example of the try-to-sucker-you-by-omission-and-feined-ignorance approach was a Phaser printer being offered for sale for a few hundred $ with no mention of WHY nobody uses wax printers anymore. In short- you MUST cover your ass like crazy. If it's too good to be true, it most certainly is someone trying to sucker you.
Typical, but when you consider it against Craig's motivations (community building and other crunchy-granola-ness), Craigslist has ultimately been a pretty spectacular failure. I used to report at least 5-6 posts a day to the abuse department for various reasons (all were accepted, and the abuse group IS very nice; they ALWAYS write you back! To the CL abuse staff, you have my sympathies and admiration), and I just got tired of it...it was like throwing a sandbag into a levee break and watching it disappear.
I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).
Please help metamoderate.
Seriously. Let's break out the World's Smallest Violin. The world is changing-- in a good way. The Internet is a wonderful thing. The newspapers need to change with the changing times, or perish.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
"They must have become caught in the heat of the auction" would've been correct.
It's called brand loyalty, or customer loyalty; another word is familiarity. Consumers have VERY strong preferences in everything from the underwear they buy to the car they drive to the gas they put in that car.
Decades of research and stats show this to be true- that people tend to be pretty set in their ways as consumers. So, actually, your little rant, while a wonderful bit of wonderful bit of anti-establishment ranting (the reason you were modded up)...couldn't be further from the truth.
If you buy Pepsi and a few months from now switch to Coke (god knows why, but beside the point), Pepsi most certainly considers that "lost" sales.
Please help metamoderate.
It's called captalism you socialist rejects! Get over it! Using your logic, Apple is costing Microsoft millions in computer and software sales each year, and Sony is costing them even more. How dare they compete with the X-Box?! And how dare Craigslist have the temerity to compete with newspaper classified ads???
It's the Newspaper Association of America.
While maintaining the usual tradiation of being an *AA organistation like the RIAA or MPAA, they added an unusual and exciting twist by only having one letter before the AA.
NAA.org
If you go to this page (on best online revenue models) about half way down you will find:
They haven't quite started decrying all on-line advertising yet but I'm sure they soon will do.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"Maybe it's time the papers realize that re-printing their content online and requiring everything down to maternal shoe size for access is not a great business model."
Care to give any examples of online magazines asking for shoe size? Or do you think that by exaggerating the situation you'd drum up sympathy for your position that you prefer content without implicit contract?
Dear Jezus! They've figured out a way of doing something in the world ****more efficiently****. The world is going to come to an end! Oh woe is me!!! We're doomed!!!
[ what a bunch of fucking retards ]
Frickety Hoo.
I just placed a help wanted on Craigslist for $25.
My $25 got me 350 qualified, internet-literate resumes in about 24 hours.
The New York Times would have cost about $200 a day for the same ad. Craigslist would have run the ad for 30 days but I pulled it after 2 days because there's no way I can read that many resumes.
Monster.com would charge, I think, $400 for an ad. The one time I tried that I got really poor resumes from people who weren't even in the same country let alone in the same city.
On Craigslist my ad appears on a page with about 20 ads. The NYT would put it in tiny print on a page with hundreds of ads.
On Craigslist I can provide a complete job description, a full page of HTML, and include a photo of all the good looking people in my office so people want to work for us.
In the Times I get 3 lines of tiny print.
Need I say more?
(By the way... it's kind of sad, because Craig doesn't use the revenue he gets from classfied ads to send reporters around the world to keep me informed. An informed citizenry is a crucial component of democracy.)
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Craigslist was (and is) still a valuable resource in every city it is in, but only as much as any semi-over-populated online resource is. While I'm not disagreeing with you (to some extent), I will disagree with the general tone of your post.
If you are smart enough to pass over the cruft and farkle, you will find the gems. If you aren't, you'll be lost in the backwash of the 'Net, just like the rest.
"Now if that same asshole had "stolen" a song, game or movie via file sharing he would have gotten an investigation, time, fines... hell - even a C&D would have been better! Such is the law in this free country."
Sounds to me like chance plays a role in both situations.
I paid them 90% of what I took in, they make a killing exploiting kids for what ends up being much less than minimum wage.
At least, it's what it says on my drivers license, or last week's Newsweek.
Craig
"I find it annoying that some established businesses seem to view the continued patronage of their customers as an entitlement, even in the face of better, cheaper alternatives."
Similiar to competing with the "better, cheaper" chop shop, and hot bicycles emporium.
We have problems, all right, but we find that the vast majority of folks are trustworthy, and solid.
We get a lot of feedback everyday, to that effect.
Also, we have no "advisory committee". I do have a real good customer service team, of which I'm a part. (I demoted myself from management some time ago.)
Feel free to consider what we're doing a failure, however, I'd guess there's about twenty million others who have a different opinion.
Craig
"Looks like the print industry in general may be running into this problem that their audience doesn't want to wait for tomorrow to get today's news."
Proving that information overload, time-compression and the resulting social psychosis is self-inflicted.
"Maybe if all news sites required me to pay (like NYTIMES) but then I'd just find another one (why do I have to pay to read a site AND still get advertisements in the page...."
Advertisements are part of the reason people buy newspapers. Just like the old Computer Shopper.
I appreciate the kind words.
We do want to promote the kind of citizen journalism you're allude to in your parenthetical comment. I don't know what that means yet, but I've chatted a little with the ohmynews guys and Dan Gillmor, and will figure out something.
Craig
Apartment glut, Craigslist doom fees for service
Listing services, which typically charge tenants a set fee, also have succumbed to the great equalizer known as Craigslist.com. The familiar online clearinghouse lets visitors advertise apartments, used furniture, concert tickets or themselves for free. Only employers posting jobs pay fees.
A boon to consumers, Craigslist has proven a thorny problem for those who try to make money by publishing ads for workaday necessities.
"You can't compete with free," [Dana] Goodell said. "Our market niche is over."
Too bad the Rental List Association of America didn't exist. Maybe the NAA will be a little better.
I wish that I could find the Fry's Electronics newspaper ads online someplace. It's a real hassle to find a newspaper on Fridays to see exactly what is going on sale and for how much.
It seems like this would be a natural thing for posting on an internet site. But Fry's Electronics is way behind the times when it comes to electronic commerce. I know that they do have a lame website, but it doesn't list the same specials that the newspaper does.
I also wish that there was a site that listed all the items in the various grocery stores in the city. So I could shop for sales without having to mess with finding/buying/getting a newspaper. For example:
Tortino' Pizza Safeway ThrillMart
10.3 Oz Combo $1.78 4/$5.00
Listing the thousands of items on the shelves and their prices for various supermarket chains, updated weekly.
These stores go on and on about customer service but their totally clueless on how to use advanced ten-year-old 20th-century technology to actually provide a service to their customers, like listing the prices of everything they sell in downloadable ZIP file. They already have this information in their computers to facilite bar-code point-of-sale checkouts. They should make it available to the customers on-line. At least they should have the newspaper ad supplement available for downloading as a JPG file, even that would be nice.
I'm just amazed that retailers have ALL this computer equipment in their stores but are completely clueless about ways to use it for marketing and promotion. Imagine a grocery store that allows you to bid like eBay on perishable items, instead of just paying people to throw away perfectly good fruit because it's not brainwashed-housewife perfect.
I wish all these people who ran retail stores would just start to 'think outside the box'. Maybe I'm just wishing for too much.
" The Internet is a wonderful thing."
actually:
The Internet is a thing.
what craig did with it was wonderful.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Man posts large, bitter critique of extremely popular website.
Founder of said website responds. Responds! In a day and age when most companies' sites don't have a feedback mechanism of any kind, Craig is lurking around Slashdot. Of course, his response is a bland corporate "well, we still have customers left, so we can't be doing anything wrong" (spent a little too much time in management before 'demoting yourself', eh?), but he responded.
I think I may have a warm fuzzy.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That might be easy where you live, but I'm up near Boston.
Where I live it's VERY hard to even get permission to have a rifle locked-up in your home.
Mace is illegal here.
Also, where I live, if someone comes into my home looking to steal shit, all I have the right to do is detain him until police arrive. I would be thrown in jail for kicking a home-invader's ass, and subject to civil action as well.
Apparently to get the level of licensure to own a handgun here I'd have to take a written test, a certified (target) test, and gun safety training annually, in addition to getting written permission from town hall and the police department.
Apparently the former police chief of a nearby town was DENIED the right to bring his handguns here when he moved (to be closer to family), because "I hunt, and as a former officer of the law I need the protection afforded by firearms." isn't reason enough for town hall to grant you the class-a license.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Robbery of an item of that value is a misdemeanor where you live? And the cops aren't interested in pursuing someone for assault with actual bodily harm?
What sort of cockamamie state do you live in, so I can avoid ever moving there?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I didn't enjoy someone misrepresenting what I said.
The deal is that we work on continuous improvement, and obsess about customer service. That's what I'm focusing on at the moment, trying to shut down a coupla spammers targeting our posters; also, dealing with some bickering in our discussion boards, and working with badly behaving apartment brokers in NY. (That's my biggest single project, and it looks like we've had some luck getting them to avoid sleazy behavior... but this will take me personally another year or two.)
I'm tired, and want to get back to Quicksilver, and wondering if I'm smart to try out Xandros.
Craig
This post brought to you by the Slashdot Spelling Nazi Association (SSNA).
I was so happy to get my paper route when I was a kid, that it took me two weeks to realize that I was getting charged for the extra papers that I didn't use..two months later, they still kept giving me extra copies, no matter what my complaints.
This taught me a lesson. When they refuse to stop screwing you, then screw back! After almost three months of delivering with NO profit, I made my collections, called my contact to tell him that I was moving away, and bought myself a new bike that never delivered another paper again.
(And as long as the advertisements packed into a paper weigh more than the news, I'll never buy another newspaper, either!)
' I'll eat anything, as long as someone else has tried it first. '
Not to mention that the big daily newspapers 'of record' are always the most backward and conservative institution in any city.
In my city, whenever the cops shoot somebody for no reason at all, the newspaper is always 100% behind the police regardless of the circumstances or evidence. When there was an anti-war demonstration and people brought their children, the police blocked off all street exits and went in spraying everyone (including little children) with Mace and pepper spray. The newspaper was behind the police 100% and demanded in an editorial that parents who brought their children to a legal anti-war demonstration be arrested for child abuse and have the kids put into foster homes. Nor did they change when all the video tapes of police macing and beating people resulted in a judgement against the police totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The local newspaper kept secret their own investigation into the story that the governor had a long sexual affair with a 14-year-old girl.
The newspaper is the most backward, 'cement-head' knee-jerk, mean and stupid institution in any city. They deserve to be tossed into the ash-can of history. If this happens through the classified ads, then fine.
Did you get that from Enron/ArthorAnderson CPAs or lawyers?
It may be a general experession, but its not a legal or accounting fact.
In that case, the govt costs me 5-8% yearly in inflation, yet I cannot claim that in my tax can I?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
what happens is the need to make more money then the year before.
so once the readership gets to its peak for its area, there profitsd level off.
But they still need to make MORE then last year, so they start cutting things and trying to drive sales by putting in 'cathcy' stories.
People who are investers need to relize that there our market caps, and once you are selling to everybody who is going to buy your revenue growth may flatten off.
TO me, if a compnay profit 10,ooo,ooo one year, and profit 10,000,000 the next, it's a profitable company.
But investers pull out, stock prices fall, and the board panics.
It is happening to Microsoft right now. People aren't buying there products i9n the numbers they are used to because there OS and Office suites are 'good enough' abd doin't warrent
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Yeah, I use Yahoo. I'd be interested to find out more about there technology...perhaps over dinner?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seeking cute nerd-guy - 22 (SF)
ISO Long-haired and geeky. - 25 (berkeley)
I'm gonna go email my geeky self to those two girls before the rest of you guys storm their mailboxes!
And in other news, horse and buggy sales are way down. Industry analysts blame automobile manufacturers.
Yes, please do something about the apartment brokers. I hate wasting my time looking at an apartment in Park Slope and finding out its in BedStuy (ultra ghetto) or on Coney Island or not even in Brooklyn. Perhaps some system by which the neighborhood boundries are defined and a precise address is required for listing. Brokers in NYC are just shady by nature. I saw the same apartment twice with two different brokers (in a bit of a sting operation) and the first one offered it to me for $2000 with no fee and the second one wanted me to sign a fee contract just to see the place and wanted $2200. She also tried to tell me the fee was a months rent and upon reading the small print it states the fee was 15%. After calling her out on this she was so shocked she demanded the name of the other broker.
the newspapers are losing business to craigslist postings from women looking for generou$ companion$hip?
/. researches and writes their own stories.
please.....thats like saying
Here in SF where Craig's List (CL) started and is king, the San Francisco Chronicle's classified section has dried up to a fraction of what it was in the past.
It has gotten so bad that the Chronicle will run many types of classified ads indefinitely once the ad is placed.
CL is the first place the majority of bay area folks look to buy and sell their stuff or find an apartment.
From what I've read Craig is true stand up guy. He passed up multi-millions during the dot.com heyday to keep Craig's List free from corporate control and undesired influences.
To give you an idea of the amount of money Craig passed on, a former partner sold his 25% stake in CL for $10+ million after the dot.com crash to eBay.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
(The audience is now deaf)
What's the difference? These 'free' people keep crushing good things! If they're losing money that's their problem and no one else's! Why is it that if someone does something poorly it becomes everyone else's problem?
- Singpolyma
.... after having read the KC star this sunday, all i can say is GOOD.
I hope craigslist runs you idiotic newspapers out of business. You wont be missed. They dont even bother proofreading anymore.
I read 2 articles that wouldve made a 4th grade english teacher choke, dont they have a spell-checker at these newspapers? After that, I just couldnt take anymore, its like watching a train wreck.
It ain't baseball, sportsfans. It's whining. Corporate whining, individual whining, and whining by proxy. Now I am supposed to feel sorry for the dying newspaper industry after this pathetic whinge?
Whine away, I don't care anymore.
Nobody is paying for my $1 billion a month horoscopes because of those damn free horoscopes in the papers! They are *costing* me billions! Whine, cry, boo-hoo.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Garage sale signs, and the FOR SALE sign on my car are costing newspapers millions of dollars a year! Online ads for jobs and merchandise for sale in Vancouver are costing the Chicago Tribune MILLIONS each year! How can someone justify something like this... shame on them.
Perhaps their educations also told them that "lose" can mean:
"to fail to keep, sustain, or maintain"
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I get to respond to Craig himself in a thread on /.
I feel honored!
Craig, your list rocks. Please keep up the great work, and leave the site just the way it is. (Tiny gradual improvements welcome over time, as you've been doing, but that's it.) That is all I have to say.
-CL user for 4+ years
I'd have to disagree- yes there are scams, but they're the same as those posted on the classifieds or on a community cork board.
/. time.
Look at what % of transactions that ebay handles and what % of non-commercial transactions, then look at the resulting ratio of fraud complaints from that diluted # against fraud complaints in any major city's classifieds. This smells like a retail troll buying
I've been screwed more times by major US retailers (once) in tehir own stores than I have on Craigslist in 2 years of relatively vigorous use.
The scams on craigs can be detected (using your brain, fellow citizens...) without leaving your home, which is far more to say than retailers like frye's, compusa, bestbuy, etc.etc. etc. that still hide behind loss-leaders and bait and switch tactics, screwing you openly in their bricks and mortar outlets...
My $2 says the poster works for a retailer.
If you're dumb enough to buy without skepticism, then Wal-Mart wants your zip-code, and already has your last paycheck.
STOP. You're being farmed.
I don't understand how big business gets all up in arms about someone building a better mousetrap. That's what this economy was built on. Craigslist doesn't charge for ads. Newspapers do. Craigslist is stealing business from newspapers. Then newspapers need to innovate. Free enterprise is great when you're on the rising edge of the curve, but I'm not gonna cry for you when you cut yourself on the other edge of that sword.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
It is not persay or per say or some such, it is per se. It comes from latin per (by) se (it) and means something like by itself or in itself. The proper way to pronounce se is not say, either, but English speakers have trouble with pure vowels.
If you don't know how to spell per se just say "as such" or "by itself" or swhatever, spelling it like that make it seem you don't know shit and you're trying to be pretencious, trying to use a Latin formula without knowing where it comes from.
Ban competition and GOOSH, everybody's problem is solved!
Craig, if anyone ought to read about dealing with groups on a large scale, it's you. Have you read:. html
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy
"A group is its own worst Enemy"?
My Journal
Add a million or two due to the bandwidth costs from the slashdotting. Way to go, /.
On the brighter side, now that their site is unreachable, they have nothing to worry about, I guess..
You do know you can subscribe to the newspaper, after which it will come to your house by delivery? Alot of newspapers also let you only subscribe for weekends or Sundays when most of the inserts and ads are present. Stop whining.
My local paper costs less than 20 cents a day after subscribing for a year.
Hundreds of Slashdot commentors didn't bother to read the fucking article.
"'Craigslist has created an extremely important and valuable marketplace, and perfectly illustrates the changing nature of the classified advertising industry,' Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence, said in a statement."
I don't see any "whining" from the media conglomerates here. To the contrary, it looks like the report argues for companies to adapt.
CraigsList:
craigslist is a highly popular network of urban online communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with employment, housing, personals, for sale/wanted, services, community, events, gigs and resumes categories) and forums sorted by various topics. It was founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark for the San Francisco Bay Area and was incorporated in 1999, as a for-profit company with social goals. After incorporation, it expanded into nine more cities in 2000, four each in 2001 and 2002, fourteen in 2003; as of 2004, craigslist is in about 75 cities, in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, continental Europe, Australia, Asia, and [[Brazil]. As of 2004, craigslist operates with a staff of 14 people. It does not advertise. Its sole source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities ($75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area and $25 per ad for New York and Los Angeles). It receives one billion page views per month from five million unique visitors. Its revenue was approximately $10 million in 2003.
from here:
Reply to: anon-53632282@craigslist.org
Date: 2004-12-28, 1:44AM PST
I'm a 27yr old Male looking for REALLY HOTT guys that want to be paid for letting me video tape while sucking their cock. Your face shot will not be in the video if you dont want to have it in. But ur cock in my mouth will. Serious inquireies only send ur pic and stats,, also how much $$ u would like in return. U be HOTT CLEAN and discreet
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
53632282
$300 item + reluctance to name technogadget on slashdot = ipod
I guess he just "had" to use those earphones.
Excerpt from one of the personals
"you must host i am looking to plese u all day as in licking and...."
How come the print media hasn't hired the MPAA/RIAA lawyers to save their outdated business model. We can't have the buyers(eq. to listeners?) giving money directly to the sellers(eq to artists?) now can we?
Craigslist should be taken down with the FBI's help and the operators brought up on some bogus terrorism charges.
Everything other than newspapers costs newspaper companies money. If I keep myself occupied and don't buy a newspaper because I don't have any time to read it, then everything I do which takes up my time costs them money. It's an econimic concept called 'opportunity cost'.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Innovate or die. Just because some disruptive technology hurts your bottom line doesn't make it wrong... It just proves that your current business model is wrong and/or stupid.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Newspapers and other traditional media have worked on moving into the internet advertising space. One example is Classified Ventures, a joint venture of a half dozen media companies is an example. You might know them for their cars.com or Apartments.com products.
You seem to imply that New York Times is doing poorly. That is far from the case. Consider this. You might be far too astute to want to give away all of the information they ask for in their registration form. You are probably also too astute to be their primary market for their advertisers.
What costs the papers money is their inability to adapt to the shifts in the market. Craigslist offers something they don't or can't.
This is a great example of showing how people feel ENTITLED to profits they were making at one time or another.
:-)
"...costing them money..."???
It isn't costing them any money!! They are simply not making money on things (classisfied ads) that they had previously made money on in the past... Sounds a lot like the record industry to me!
tough shit thats what capitalism is all about, finding news ways to compete and make money. i will shed no tear for multi million dollar media empires who want to monoplise everything to death to suit their bottom lines.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Um, FLAMEBAIT?
Plebe accountant goes into newspaper owner's office:
"Sir, advertising revenues are down again."
Looking out from behind business section today's paper the concerned owner asks "Any ideas why?"
"Nope. None of the competitors seems to be picking up business."
Plebe accountant leaves. Exec folds paper and puts it on the desk -- right above the fold the headline reads "Ebay buys into CraigsList" -- exec does not make the connection.
This is 21st Century American Business. NOBODY OWES YOU A JOB (heard that quote before?). But EVERYONE OWES you their business (implicitly assumed).
Besides, doesn't your company give Everyday Low Prices [SM]? AND great service? Of COURSE you're entitled to that money!
Please continue to hold. All of our representatives are busy helping other customers. Your call is Very Important to us!
On the topic of "your money is ours and not giving it to us means that we lose it" mentality..
The law guarentees that car insurance companies make assloads of money. If you're driving and haven't posted several thousand dollars in escrow to prove 'financial responsibility' then you either have car insurance or are driving illegally.
Is that what they're going to get at? To look for some kind of law against CL and try to get it taken down? Why don't they have the RIAA spam their website host with C&Ds for no reason?
Seems to work usually.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
People ... tend to be really flaky,
like people asking $500 for a Pentium 3 system.
people are complete IDIOTS when it comes to listing their items. "Printer. Best offer."
like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb
Yeah, I hate those Washington Post and Citypaper classifieds... you can't trust anyone. People are stupid all over.
Oh wait, what where you talking about again?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The newspapers don't like someone beating them at their (poorly-played) game. If the newspapers were smarter, they would be in Craigslist's shoes, and Craigslist wouldn't exist. Maybe the newspapers in the Bay area need to A D A P T. Develop a new business model? Fight fire with fire? It's called free enterprise.
Local newsrag wanted $60 for a 2 line, 1 week listing for my motorcycle. I put a full ad w/ pics on Craigslist and it sold in a whopping 4 hours. Only thing the papers are good for is local editorials and opinions, and frankly, the indies (like http://westword.com/ here in Denver) do a better job on those.
I've been using craigslist occasionally for a year or so and have noticed it getting worse. The ads are starting to look like Ebay and less like a community newspaper (or online community). Scammers run wild there. There's a lot of problems, but the worst problem is the community-self-moderating system. It relies on the community to flag and remove the trouble makers, spam, scams, and whatever else. It just isn't working when the trouble makers outweigh the people trying to moderate. The result is like the person I'm replying to said, it gets tiresome when all your work isn't getting you any result. And the canned responses from abuse are hardly any consolation.
If so, that would have made a nice concise description of what craigslist is. Or is UseNet so old no one knows or cares about it anymore?
shark72 says I linked to the wrong report, and it looks like they have two reports re: newspapers and Craigslist.
My guess is that you had access to the real thing. Do you have your browser configured to report itself as a googlebot? Some web sites auto-allow google into their 'protected' content....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
the news is out and suddenly newspapers are claiming that it's costing them money (50-65 million U.S. dollars a year)
Yup, that's how the free market is supposed to work: cheaper, more efficient technologies are taking away revenue from older, less efficient technologies.
I'm surprised newspapers are still going as strong as they are; except for a lot of arrogance, attitude, and the ability to line the cat litter box, they don't offer much over web-based news.
It was announced today that the NewsPaper Association of America has joined forces with the RIAA and MPAA and decided to sue anyone offering free unregulated classifieds!
Ford is outraged that Chevy is not making substandard products. Chevy is accused of using competition as a shady business tactic.
and y'know, I can't take the credit, I'm not a really good manager.
Jim Buckmaster and Eric Scheide really get the credit, and in particular, they've assembled a really good tech team. All the Joshes we have are really good. (I've lost track of how many.)
I used to be technical, but seriously, customer service rep is my second career, and now I hear jokes like "step away from the root password".
Craig
You're right, being discussed now.
Next step focuses on apartment listings, we'll be running a discussion board where we can get feedback from renters and brokers as to how we can do a better job. We need to be fair to both sides, ain't easy.
Craig
but I'll share this with the team.
I keep forgetting to add, that I routinely cite slashdot as a really good example of community and related tools, in talks I give, to the press, etc.
Craig
This is a really big deal for the newspaper industry.
Consider:
The main source of revenue for newspapers (and some magazines) are subscriptions (which generally cover only maybe 20% of the cost of publication), mass market advertisements, and classified ads. Of these, classified ads are by far the most profitable and desirable: [a] they are very cheap to operate (the customers provide and even pay for all the content), and [b] they are the one form of advertisement that people want to see.
Think about that: all other forms of advertising are a nuisance that people go out of their way to ignore (witness TiVo, banner ad blockers, the ritual shaking of new magazines over recycle bins to drop all the inserts, etc), but sometimes, when a person is ready to buy something -- particularly something big -- they'll buy a whole newspaper or magazine just to pore over the real estate listings, or the automotove listings, or the ads in a photography magazine or the old "Computer Shopper", etc.
Most of the time, people hate ads, but sometimes, we want them so badly that we're willing to pay for them. The newspaper industry has been using this tendency to subsidize their business model for over a century now. They know full well that Craigslist is a threat to that model.
Consider:
About a year ago, NPR ran a piece on Craigslist. In this piece, they talked about the site, and how profitable it is, and how they manage this by using job listings for the San Francisco area to subsidize all their operating expenses still leaving a lot left over as profit. For this piece, NPR interviewed Lisa DeSisto, general manager of the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, by way of comparing Craigslist to more traditional publications. The reporter claimed that DeSisto sees Craigslist as creating a new market for people that want to sell small things but don't want to pay for a traditional ad; for the soundbite in the piece, she says that "anyone who brings buyers and sellers is a threat, so yes, we absolutely view them as a threat". An honest remark, but a bland one.
A few weeks after that piece ran, I saw DeSisto, and mentioned having heard her on the radio recently. "Oh, that Craigslist thing? Yeah, they are going to kick our asses."
Much more direct and honest, eh?
But it's not just Boston.com, or the newspapers in San Francisco that the current piece talks about -- it's every market that Craigslist or someone like them goes into. Newspaper revenues have been going steadily downward for 20 or 30 years, and they're scrambling to keep up with the drain. They've more or less made their peace with the web, as it's still basically what they were doing all along, and the fact that you're reading their ads and their articles on a screen instead of a sheet of paper isn't all that important to them. But sites like Craigslist suggest that things are going to be much harder for them than they may have realized five or ten years ago: these sites may be able to keep their audience, but their ability to monetize that audience with classified ads is evaporating, compounding the decades-long slump in revenues from subscriptions and not offset by other forms of advertisement. If there is a way out of this, it doesn't seem to be obvious to anybody yet...
Notes:
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Hey, my instincts suggest that brokers won't do that, in practice.
Can you email me this? I want to share with my team, though, maybe they can be smarter than me.
thanks!
Craig
sounds like a good fit to eventually remove all Windows from the organization.
I'm running suse right now, hard to get support, great for our servers.
also, karma spoke: ordered from a small shop, turns out the guy is someone we helped regarding apartments.
Craig
we need to make this much better, I agree.
if you want, send me the link.
Craig
but I figure everyone has something to say, and we're flawed, and some of the criticism is very valid.
I really do appreciate it, thanks!
Craig
Newspapers are being replaced with something that is:
1) Free to us
2) Not cutting down trees
Excellent.
It like saying "But we have to keep paying these programmers to make programs we could make ourselves with open source" or "Lets just keep paying these people even though we don't need them". Luddites didn't win in the end.
If you're losing you're job you should be made to accept it. Of course it's easier not to but from the collective point of view it's best for you to lose your job.
Same applies to outsourcing... assuming you feel a human is a human and not a human labelled U.S citizen...
What a quagmire.
A blog I run for the wealth
suggestions appreciated!
Craig
Unless of course trees are cut down to dig up the coal that powers the electricity plants that power the web servers that provide the craigslist content.
Looks like I should have just gone into pre-press instead of being a systems administrator. After 5 years of experience, I'm getting paid $14.37 an hour, no benefits.
Mind you, I suspect that the printing industry is slightly more profitable than the ISP industry, which produces next to no profits for various reasons.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
no big deal, not owner though.
Craig
We're at the start of a major transition in mass media. (I'm tempted to refer to a singularity in the Vingean sense, but few get it.)
1. the big issue is trust. We've crossed a point where people don't believe what they read. For example, people know, and reporters admit, that they'll hear lies and not expose them. Best example, would be the White House press corps, with the heroic exception of Helen Thomas, who might be the only one asking hard questions.
2. "citizen journalism" is emerging, check out ohmynews.com and whatever Dan Gillmor's doing
3. convergence of technologies might produce someone competing with paper, like flexible displays with wifi
(This is the short version, written in a hurry, so please give me a break, okay?)
I'm telling journalist friend to start checking this out, since I figure the tipping point will happen in maybe five years. (I should know better than to predict; I'm still bitter there are no lunar colonies... and what about jetpacks?)
Real-world situations, I gather, tend to be inconclusive and fuzzy. There's no way to know what the outcome would have been if he hadn't had the gun. There's no way to know what his potential assailants' intended actions or states of mind were.
I don't think it's really possible to be as precise as you'd like in stories where no one ends up dead, where everyone goes home and gets into bed with what they started out with.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I didn't know they even made people as altruistic as you. I don't know how you do it, but I don't think I can ignore that it would be my missing PDA and bruised head (or, hell, I don't know how crazy he was---perhaps my life) versus a dead someone-else. I'd have to be a fool to throw down my life for a thief's.
Intellectually, I'd shoot the guy in a hot second. If it came to it? I hope I never have to know, and I wouldn't want that on my conscience in any case. But it's utter insanity to just lay down your life if you have a choice. (Absolutely no disrespect meant to the original poster, as he didn't have the luxury of making that choice.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
have no one to blame but themselves. They should have OWNED online classified. A lot of people told them so, and even told them how to do it, back in 1994-1996. But classified advertising was a huge cash cow, and newspaper/media companies thought that they could continue to produce 25-30 percent margins forever by not changing other than by consolidation. Many of them thought there was more money in becoming virtual ISPs, since that was free money. (We'll do the marketing, you provide the network, we get half.) It was one of the more stunning missed opportunities of the era, IMO.
n/t
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the original poster was making a "joke".
Note: It wasn't a newspaper editor who talked about the "loss" of revenue. It was a consultant who makes his living from newspapers who was being dramatic.
If we can drop the emotional side of the whole side of the issue (newspapers BAD, Craig GOOD), it seems obvious that people choose various means to dispose of unwanted goods, find a job, or whatever.
First off, they are likely to use whatever medium to which they are accustomed. Ergo, newspaper readers buy newspaper ads, Internet folks like using the Web, TV-oriented people buy "classifieds" on cable TV, etc. In my experience, it's hard to convince people to use a medium they don't see day-to-day, or aren't familiar with.
Secondly, people weigh the cost of the advertisement in terms of time and money. What's more convenient and costs less? And results count, too. Sometimes we're actually trying to make a profit (oh my god) on our own stuff, and so want to maximize the return on our advertising investment. If we were all just trying to sell our stuff online for free, eBay would be dead.
True, the trend is for more online advertising and less print. What would you do if you owned a newspaper? Not a big-city rag, but a small-town daily with real employees and the need to pay them...