The Real On-Line Threat to MSM

Lest the blogosphere get too big a head about its potential ability to take readers away from newspapers, here's a study (registration required) that shows where the Internet's biggest hit on the big, old print media is: in the lowly, but highly profitable, classified ad pages.

If the car and real estate ads get hit the way Monster obliterated the job listings in the classified pages, the papers could lose, in aggregate, $4 billion.

It's hard to overstate the importance of classifieds to newspapers' bottom lines. Those pages of pure agate type are so profitable that, according to Mr. Ubinas, one newspaper executive said classified ads were a "better business than printing dollar bills."

But the proliferation of online sites as diverse as monster.com, realestate.com and craigslist.com has substantially complicated newspapers' hold on the format. "Once upon a time, classifieds was the exclusive property of newspapers," said Mort Goldstrom, the NAA's vcie president of advertising. "That time is over."