NEWSPAPERS' ONLINE CLASSIFIED AD NETWORKS are booming in the first quarter of 2007, and Cars.com is leading the way, with all-time highs of 9 million unique visitors and 15 million total visits in March--the latter representing 17% growth over the previous month.
What's more, the visits weren't just casual browsing. A record number of visitors contacted car dealers during that period, with email and phone leads jumping 20% over the same period in 2005. A collaboration between the Tribune Company, the Times Mirror Company and The Washington Post is proving fruitful; in all, Cars.com has partnerships with more than 200 metro newspapers and TV stations.
They may be fighting each other tooth-and-nail, but collectively, job recruitment classified networks are also enjoying an upsurge. Between December and January, CareerBuilder saw unique visitors jump from 10 million to 12 million, Monster's climbed from 11 million to 14 million, and Yahoo's HotJobs jumped from 6 to 10 million (a 66% increase). Altogether, that's an increase of 9 million unique visitors, or 33%, in just one month.
CareerBuilder is a collaboration between the Tribune Company, Gannett, Scripps, and McClatchy, while Monster recently announced deals with The New York Times and tech firm Adicio to share job listings with its network of more than 200 newspapers, including The Seattle Times, Star Tribune of Minneapolis and Career Journal, a site maintained by The Wall Street Journal. In 2006, HotJobs partnered with nine major newspaper companies. HotJobs now has partnerships with hundreds of newspapers around the country.
A 2006 Deutsche Bank study noted that the survival of newspapers relies on affiliating with networks and forming an online classifieds presence--either by creating one or allying with an existing player. The report, "Class System in Classifieds," states that newspapers that are part of the CareerBuilder network held onto an average 57% of their online classified markets, versus 41% for those that are unaffiliated.
Cars.com kicked off an aggressive $110 million-plus ad campaign in February that will run throughout the year. The goal is to drive traffic to the new features and build brand awareness.
