Thursday, 12 April 2012

Classified advertising

Classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals which may be sold or distributed free of charge. Advertisements in a newspaper are typically short, as they are charged for by the line, and one newspaper column wide.
Publications printing news or other information often have sections of classified advertisements; there are also publications which contain only advertisements. The advertisements are grouped into categories or classes such as "for sale - telephones", "wanted - kitchen appliances", and "services - plumbing", hence the term "classified".
Classified advertisements are much cheaper than larger display advertisements used by businesses, and are mostly placed by private individuals with single items they wish to sell or buy.


A number of online services called aggregators crawl and aggregate classifieds from sources such as blogs and RSS feeds, as opposed to relying on manually submitted listings.
Additionally, other companies provide online advertising services and tools to assist members in designing online ads using professional ad templates and then automatically distributing the finished ads to the various online ad directories as part of their service. In this sense these companies act as both an application service provider and a content delivery platform. Social classifieds is niche that is growing in online classified ads.




In 2003 the market for classified ads in the United States was $15.9 billion (newspapers), $14.1 billion (online) according to market researcher Classified Intelligence. The worldwide market for classified ads in 2003 was estimated at over $100 billion. Perhaps due to the lack of a standard for reporting, market statistics vary concerning the total market for internet classified ads. The Kelsey Research Group listed online classified ads as being worth $13.3 billion, while Jupiter Research provided a conservative appraisal of $2.6 billion as of 2005 and the Interactive Advertising Bureau listed the net worth of online classified revenue at $2.1 billion as of April 2006.
Newspaper's revenue from classifieds advertisements is decreasing continually as internet classifieds grow. Classified advertising at some of the larger newspaper chains dropped by 14% to 20% in 2007, while traffic to classified sites grew by 23%.
As the online classified advertising sector develops, there is an increasing emphasis toward specialization. Vertical markets for classifieds are developing quickly along with the general marketplace for classifieds websites. Like search

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