Why Vertical Search Engines Killed the Newspaper Business

Hey all, here is the original post I read, I tried commenting there, but for some reason - I got rejected as spam. Go Figure. Here is my Response to:

"How Craigslist and Google Pushed Newspapers off a cliff."

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-and-craigslist-pushed-newspapers-off-a-cliff-2009-5#comment-form

Jonathan Wegener - said it right (See his comment at the link above) the verticals are the biggest cause of newspapers demise. The advertisers have options now, in each major classified vertical - online. PLUS  major advertisers  have invested in their OWN sites - their own online presence. Therefore, the web has become "the newspaper" and these vertical sites, have become "the advertising sections" for each major area: Travel, Doctors, Auto and Real Estate

These verticals have greatly effected where advertisers put their money. I personally have one client in the NYC market that has cut $600K - of yearly advertising -  from one paper. Countless others have cut print expenditures by 50% or greater - couple THAT with the overall real estate collapse, and brokers HAD to cut back from print anyway. This simply made the budget cut's much easier and necessary to make. their hands were forced for many years to stay in the papers, but now, with the current state of the real estate market, transactions and dollar volume are down, therefore, their advertising budgets are down - so they have to do MORE with less - Hello Web Efficiencies!

if an advertiser can spend $1 online and turn it to $5 - why would they go back to print?

Finally, real estate is not the only industry hit hard by the economy. Across the board, advertisers need to cut back. CMO's across the U.S. are being asked to show RESULTS, not brand recognition. They want the needle to move. Therefore, buying advertising online and monitoring conversion to the penny, with systems that were not available even 2 years ago, have further diminished the need to be in the newspaper. The newspaper cannot compete with the tracking and accountability available online. The NY Times did very well by going online years ago and establishing themselves, they also did well by releasing their articles for free. They got it and will capitalize on it, One day the NYT will be just a weekend edition - with mobile and online daily's, then eventually - just a monthly magazine, until finally it is a 100% media website..

For those who want an education on vertical Search, and why sites like Trulia - are in Fact a type of Search Engine, please read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search

The long and short of it, is this particular paragraph from Wikipedia:

"Broad-based search engines such as Google or Yahoo fetch very large numbers of documents using a Web crawler. Another program called an indexer then reads these documents and creates a search index based on words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indexes so that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Vertical search engines, on the other hand, send their spiders out to a highly refined database, and their indexes contain information about a specific topic. As a result, they are of most value to people interested in a particular area; what’s more, the companies that advertise on these search engines reach a very focused audience. For example, there are search engines for veterinarians, doctors, patients, job seekers, house hunters, recruiters, travelers and corporate purchasers, to name a few."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search Wikipedia