"It's the Classifieds, stupid." No kidding. I came up with this concept on my own today.. RSS feeds of newspaper classified ads. Then I saw this tagline above on a web page. Wouldn't this potentially be something that challenges the mighty eBay? eBay took the classified model and added community, trust, power of the web. A classifieds aggregator could bring some of these value-adds back to the newspaper.
I did a Google search for RSS Classfied Ad and got back many hits. Looks like I'm not the first to think of it by a long shot. Here are a couple:
"Most of the RSS community is focused on content. That's great; so was the early Web. But feeding classified ads to aggregators is the next obvious step, and will prove to be hugely profitable for newspapers — or whoever decides to do it first. "
"And he sees revenue possibilities here. "RSS could be a great way of distributing and reading classified ad information, customized to the user's preferences. If news media don't do this soon, eBay and Monster will."
The question is, why would a newspaper do this? How would they explain the value to their customers (the advertisers). Seems there would need to be a solid, well known Aggregator out there that the advertisers would trust and count on to bring more eyeballs to their product. Then the newspaper could upsell this feature. Seems some papers like the NY Times are already visionary in presenting bits of content via RSS. I wonder if they've approached the advertising dept with the idea. Anyone know of any newspapers doing this?
Looks like this PostAClassified company had the good vision to let folks post a classified ad on their site, then PostAClassified would offer that posting as an RSS feed for anyone that wanted it.
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