I've written here before about the decline of newspapers, which is hardly news. The slow death of the print newspaper industry is well known.
But one thing I didn't appreciate until just recently is that, apparently, people don't advertise in papers much anymore.
I've never been a big classified advertisement reader. Some people really are, or I guess I should say that they used to be. I've known people who followed classified advertisements as close as they did the news, which you'd know as they'd assume that other people did as well. As in "did you see the advertisement for. . . ?" As I don't read the classified advertisements unless I'm really looking for something, the answer is generally "no".
Well, I have been looking through the local classifieds recently as I need to replace one of our old trucks. And its been a real shock.
The Tribune used to have a lot of automobile advertisements in the classifieds from people selling their own cars. Indeed, at one time (and maybe still) there was a separate category for four wheel drives, and classic cars, etc. There were always a lot of cars in the paper.
Well, no longer.
Indeed, now about the advertisements for cars in the paper are those placed by actual car dealers, including the used car dealers. That's about it.
This realization caused me to look at the remainder of the ads. In the Sunday paper there were very few "help wanted" ads. Entire categories of miscellaneous stuff no longer appears there. The entire section seems to be down to a selection of Sunday only "help wanted" ads and ads by local car dealers. Some pets appear there for sale as well.
I guess it makes sense, with fewer people subscribing to the paper, why place an ad there, particularly if you don't subscribe to it yourself. The Trib claims it has the biggest readership that its ever had, if you include the online readers, but they don't seem to be placing ads, so if that's true, and I suppose that translates to daily readership of a sort, its intrinsically different in this fashion.
I'm sure people still sell their own stuff, including cars, but where do they advertise them now?
2 comments:
I'd bet that a lot of stuff that used to be in classifieds ads is listed on websites like Craigslist now.
https://wyoming.craigslist.org/search/cta
Every once in a while I see ads for other similar websites (like Letgo?)
In the past, I've bought and sold a couple of vehicles with classified ads, but the older I get the more I feel like staying away from those sorts of deals if I can help it.
I'm not keen on it either.
The last vehicle I bought my son actually saw parked by the side of the road with a for sale sign on it. That was my Jeep, and that worked out really well. The last time I tried to sell a vehicle, a 94 F250, I tried the classifieds unsuccessfully and ended up selling it to a car lot.
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