From any perspective, there is already a clear winner in the changing classified advertising scene - the consumer. Never before has the consumer had so many choices for placing classified ads and for buying products from classified ads. Anybody can now easily enter keywords and price ranges for sought after items and instantly retrieve a list of available items matching their exact specifications from hundreds of Web sites. A quick hyperlinked e-mail to the seller can seal the deal. The seller can reach more people than ever before thanks to online supplements to print classifieds. And the seller can maintain the ad more efficiently, via e-mail or Web site form.

Online Newspapers At A Crossroads

Online newspapers offer online classifieds which supplement the print versions. But placement of online classifieds with the newspapers actually requires off-line placement or offline verification - a major inconvenience. Many classifieds can't be globalized. Since the majority of items sold through classifieds are locally bought and sold, the newspapers have an opportunity to maintain market share, but only if they implement online, real-time placement. Thousands of online newspapers and other sites support online viewing but no online placement of consumer classifieds. Some of the popular city guides provide links to other classified services. But the Yahoo Metro Guides provide their own as well as links to others.

FREE - Yahoo offers Metro Guides for Boston, Chicago, D.C., L.A., N.Y. and S.F. Bay. http://www.yahoo.com Each guide features a classified section with the following categories: Air and Water Craft, Employment, Real Estate (Residential), Announcements Merchandise, Rentals and Roommates, Autos and Motorcycles, Personals, Tickets, Business Opportunities, Pets and Animals, Computers and Software and Real Estate (Commercial).

Listings are free and you can maintain them yourself. We visited the Yahoo-Chicago site, where listings for many categories were on the "thin" side despite the free nature of the service. Many listings are submitted by other classified sites rather than individuals. Once you select an item of interest, you can ask Yahoo to create a map for the area where the item can be found. The service also provides links to other local newspaper and Usenet classified sites.

Classifieds2000, The Internet Classifieds, offers FREE listings and viewing of vehicle and computer classifieds. Deja News, the premier Usenet news group search engine, andLycos host the Classifieds2000 free service also, and they claim to offer the most listings on the Web. Classifieds2000 includes easy updating, a shopping cart, and Cool Notify, which is an e-mail service that notifies you when an item comes along that meets your desired criteria.

Yahoo! and ADP Auto Connect have announced plans to provide their visitors with co-branded access to free used car and truck listings from thousands of participating North American dealerships.

Auction sites provide a buying and selling forum for numerous items that were previously marketed in the classifieds such as computers, antiques and collectibles. Some of the buying frenzy which prevails at live auctions carries forward to on-line auctions, assuring a good selling price for many items. Most of the popular online auctions are actually consignment sales sites for dealers and offer no access for individuals selling single items. But a few sites actually provide a true buy/sell forum for individuals.

The Auction Block - An example of what is available, FREE of charge, to individual buyers and sellers. Categories include: Automotive, Books, Coins & Currency, Collectibles & Antiques, Comics, Computers, Game Machines & Games, Home Items, Home Electronics, Jewelry, Misc., Musical Instruments, Records, CDs, Tapes, & 8-Tracks, Sporting Goods, Sports Cards, Toys and Trading Cards. The site is fully automated. Offerings are very slim but we believe this category will grow.

eBay Auction Web - Over 300,000 individual items have been put on the auction block including real estate, antiques and collector cars. Over 1.3 million bids have been placed on the items. Enter your auction item on the online form, and receive an instant cost quote.

Currently, the dealer consignment sites such asOn Sale move $4 million dollars worth of product monthly.

Shopping for a home has never been easier. Most of the popular on-line real-estate listing services are controlled by realtors. Some support listings by Realtors as well as individual owners.Owners Network is billed as the "MLS (Multiple Listing Service) of FSBO (For Sale By Owner) properties". Listings are free but only include basic information and no photos. Owner's Network lists over 7,000 properties nationwide. Buyers can search for a property using simple search engine criteria.

For Sale By Owner Connection enables a home seller to list a property with photo and full description for up to a year for $89. Listings for the 22 states covered are sparse.

The International Real-Estate Directory, provides links to thousands of Realtor Web sites and features articles on buying and selling real-estate. IRED offers a classifieds section for buyers and sellers. A classified listing begins at about $50 per month.

A survey on a related site indicated that up to 3% of listed homes are sold as a result of an on-line listing. This was compared favorably to similar sales results from the MLS services, whereas "for sale" signs on the front lawn account for 40% of home sales.

The Monster Board is one of the premier employment sites on the Web. Companies, recruiters or individuals can post individual jobs for $150 or pay over $1,000 to post multiple positions and company profiles. Posting a job listing is handled manually after submitting a form and reaches 25,000 potential recruits daily. A free resume builder will help job hunters post their resume on-line and block their current employer from seeing it. A similar site, Intellimatch features a personal job agent that informs job hunters when suitable job listings are posted.

HeadHunter.NET is one of the largest web based employment sites on the Internet. HeadHunter.NET now has 60,000 current jobs (less than 45 days old) and literally thousands of employers and recruiters. All jobs represent original content posted by users (not skimmed from Usenet). Actually, if you take a look at Usenet, you will see that HeadHunter.NET is the single largest provider of new job content.

Career Mosaic is hosted by Bernard Hodes Advertising, a recruitment advertising agency. Employers can post job listings for $150/month and job hunters can post their resume free of charge. The job listings receive 100,000 inquiries daily. Career Mosaic also allows you to search the job listings from Usenet groups and newspapers.

CareerNET is one of hundreds of employment Web sites which provide links to thousands of other employment resource entries. To find additional Web sites which support employer and job hunter postings directly, try out CareerNET.

The first employment sites on the Internet were the USENET Newsgroups. There are now over a dozen newsgroups that focus specifically on job and resume listings and numerous others covering miscellaneous classified items, real-estate and autos.

Some examples are: misc.jobs.offered,uiuc.misc.jobs, alt.forsale, alt.building.realestate and alt.autos. Some of these groups are moderated, and others, such as misc.jobs.offered, are highly popular unmoderated free-for-alls where listings are free, posted more-or-less in real-time, and which generate a high level of activity. But the response is short-lived as the popular newsgroups receive hundreds or thousands of postings daily. In very short order, your posting is lost in a sea of newer postings.

America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy have their own classified sections for all types of items and services. Classifieds can be placed by buyers and sellers for very little cost, yet reach a potential audience of one million or more subscribers. You might find it worthwhile to subscribe to a basic service for $10 per month in order to have access to this popular classified format.

Many university sites provide links to university newsgroups, newspapers, and employment assistance sites which will post student resumes and University job listings. An example of the wide assortment of classified opportunities available can be found at theUniversity of Illinois WebSite. From the main page, students can find listings for several UIUC newsgroups which support free buyer and seller classified listings as well as links to the employment resource center where resumes can be posted online free of charge. There are also links to the Daily Illini student newspaper online classifieds.

Another UIUC site, enhances the utility of the UIUC Usenet classifieds by combining them together and enabling buyers and sellers to use the Web interface in real-time. Some of the features of this combined system include: Categorization, Searchability, and a Personal Agent, which watches out for particular words and will send the user an email when one or more of those words appear in any new messages posted, and finally, Free Availability.

The Ad One Classified Network enables you to search the classifieds of over 200 newspapers across the country. In order to place an ad, you are linked to the newspaper of choice, where you will provide detail on your ad and wait for a representative to contact you.

The local and regional newspapers which typically hosted the classifieds and made more than one-third of their ad revenue from them face a crossroad. More newspapers are bringing their classified offerings online every day but virtually none of them are offering real-time online posting of classifieds, nullifying much of the potential added value.

CareerPath is a good example of the new cooperation taking place on the Web. The following newspapers participate, feeding their classifieds to a single Web site to reach a national audience as well as reaching a local audience on their own Web site and in printed form: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fort Wayne Newspapers, The Orlando Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Seattle Times/P-I, The Columbus Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Denver Post, Minneapolis-St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Washington Post, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, The Detroit News And Free Press and The New York Times. Links to every newspaper site, where you will have to go in order to place the classifieds, can be Here.

Unfortunately, none of these classified sites supports real-time classified postings. The Washington Post still requires a phone, fax or mail order. The Seattle Times lets you enter your classified ad with complete detail online but then requires a contact by a Times employee before the ad can run. Even the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley and winner of Editor & Publisher's "Best Online Classifieds Award", requires a phone confirmation before they will run the ad in the print and online versions.

According to industry analyst Esther Dyson, the value of an interactive newspaper is the interaction it provides with other people in real-time, much the way talk radio happens. So far, this is not the case with online newspapers although the first steps are being taken.

Thomson Newspapers just acquired the Internet classified advertising division of Prodigy Services Corp. Thomson publishes 85 dailies including The Globe and Mail of Toronto, and plans to use Prodigy's classified ad system for its own newspapers and also sell the product to other publishers.

Electric Classifieds, Inc. provides its Global Online Classifieds technology to America Online's Digital City, CompuServe and Cox Interactive Media.

New Century Network is rumored to be pooling classified resources together among it's members.

One of a small handful of online news sites which support real-time interactive classifieds isThe village of Effingham,IL hosts newspaper type classifieds. The software that implements the system is low priced and appears to be robust. Contact the developer for additional information.

AdQuest Classifieds, AdQuest is promoted in more than 165 publications in 10 states, and the daily circulation of the participating newspapers is about 10 million. AdQuest's classifieds on the Internet have grown to more than 40,000 ads updated daily and are available for viewing and filtered online and off-line searches only, no postings. The classified categories that receive the largest percent of searches are employment and transportation. Other categories include merchandise, real estate, personals, announcements, recreation, services, and farm. Quest averages more than 40,000 searches, or "hits" a month.

CONCLUSION

The number of Web sites which support online, real time placement and viewing of classifieds by consumers is growing and poised to take-off. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Free sites are the legacy of the pre-1994 Web when commercial activity was not permitted. While they obviously provide the best deal, they don't support the efforts of the Web site owner. But sites such as Classifieds2000, through their affinity relationship with Deja News Usenet Search Engine, stand to gain tremendous ground through the use of user friendly features. Fee based sites generally offer the best features, the best audience reach and the best results. Online newspapers must jump on the bandwagon now, or forever lose market share.