Good for Breaking the News But..
Classified Intelligence broke the news that Google was working with classifieds sites to get a direct feed rather than fumbling around their sites and crawling them every minute.
But then Editorial Director Jim Townsend said one of the most bizarre things I have heard, especially given his role:
“On other side of that coin, Townsend said, ads that are freely available through search could destroy the pricing model used by print and online classifieds publishers.
“Just as Craigslist had a lot to do with killing the paid real estate listings,” Townsend said, “the more you give away for free, the harder it is to place a high value on it.”
Huh? Destroy the pricing model?!?! The ads are getting greater distribution! The advertiser still pays Careerbuilder, Autotrader or whomever! In fact greater distribution should lead to *higher* rates and higher pricing because more people are seeing them. Wake up and smell the coffee Mrs Bueller.
Online classifieds sites should do everything in their power to create this feed for Google. They already spend millions of dollars optimizing their web site to be crawled by the vanilla spider and placing text ads with the search engines.
