June 2007
Dynamic Market Growth – are you ready?
There was, not so very long ago, a widespread belief among newspaper publishers that the Internet ‘fad’ would, sooner or later, take its place among all other new technologies and ideas and settle, as a further component, into the developing media mix of the 21st century.
How wrong could you be?
Today we are beginning to understand that the Internet is far more than that. What we are seeing is the emergence of a lifestyle force which is changing the way we do many things – shopping, booking holidays and travel, keeping up with news, weather and traffic information, banking and managing personal finances, finding restaurants, running businesses and, most important of all – communicating.
What’s more, the Internet as a lifestyle force has almost limitless future potential – who could have predicted its impact on the music industry or that it will become, in the not-too-distant future, the way most of us make telephone calls and watch TV?
As one of the many companies which committed to the Internet in the 1990s and survived the dotcom boom and bust years, we at MatchWork are as surprised as everyone else by the rate and extent of its evolution. What we do know, however, is that, in our chosen field of the classified marketplace, it has changed the way the market functions forever.
A speaker at the recent seminar on ‘The Future of Classifieds’ in Amsterdam quoted a remarkable statistic – ‘63% of the UK population is currently online…’ and, when you look into it, Internet usage statistics are racing ahead – everywhere.
The implications for our colleagues and clients in the newspaper industry are significant and they correspond closely with our own market intelligence – both from the markets in which we are active and from contacts and possible future partners around the world.
The first unavoidable conclusion is that the growth in the influence of online in the classified advertising market will continue to increase rapidly. Currently, a figure of 10-15% is often quoted as ‘the online premium’. We expect this figure to rise sharply and you will read in another article that websites in the USA are able to increase rates for job listings online as many as six times a year. In another feature on Internet usage you will read that 65% of the UK’s Internet users look at job listings – that’s over 30% of the total population.
The second unavoidable conclusion is that online strategy can no longer be optional. Nor are ‘shared’ portals delivering the necessary results for newspapers adopting this approach. With over 100 active sites operational in Europe, we are seeing extraordinary growth being generated by integrated print/online approaches. This is what advertisers want, whether they be public sector, large corporations, recruitment agencies or small businesses in employment classifieds, dealers or individuals in the automotive section, or estate agents promoting properties.
Newspapers have a unique opportunity in this dynamic market. Why? Because of the very high levels of trust, confidence and familiarity that exist between the traditional media and their readers. Put another way, it is because, in the demanding new world of the Internet, newspaper brands have a competitive edge – as long as they embrace the new technology and maximise the benefits to their clients.
It doesn’t matter where you look – in the macro world of rapidly-growing Internet usage, or the more specialised field of the online classified advertising market, the message is the same.
Newspaper publishers must develop their trusted and resilient newspaper brands into multi-media opportunities for advertisers before the major advertisers develop their own direct online solutions and come to view newspapers as dispensable middlemen. Publishers must move swiftly into integrated strategies and maximise the benefits of their established, efficient business operations before the online specialists come and take it all away as, otherwise, they will.
Are you ready?