Local classifieds fight back in tough times
Jinfo Blog

29th May 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

First it was Yell.com beating back the challenge posed to local directory publishers by social networkers and mashers (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19169). Now its arch rivals Thomson Local and Kelly’s have joined the fray. Among the enhancements offered by Thomson Local, users can now rate and review local businesses via a five star voting system. Advertisers will be given ‘rate my work’ business cards, directing customers to the site in order to build ratings. In this respect, Thomson Local is taking on Checkatrade (http://www.checkatrade.com), which was started from at least partly altruistic motives by local businessman Kevin Byrne, after cowboy builders descended on his locality following hurricane damage in 1998. Checkatrade is now a fully fledged business turning over nearly £2 million a year. Other changes from Thomson include Thomson Local Small Ads, which offers a free buy-and-sell marketplace for individual consumers, but also allows traders to place display ads, which are further distributed to other networks using online classified specialist Oodle. A new deal with travel and holidays portal Expedia completes the Thomson package (http://digbig.com/4ytmb). Meanwhile the Reed Business Information owned Kellysearch has really broken the classifieds mould by offering news. Its product-specific industry news hub (http://digbig.com/4ytpq) incorporates Kelly’s own proprietary news and also pulls in company news, product press releases and industry articles from the Reed portfolio of trade journals. However it remains to be seen to what extent this is a genuinely comprehensive news service as opposed to a platform for Kelly’s business-to-business advertisers. Kelly’s says that its advertisers will have the opportunity to have their company included within relevant news articles written specifically for Kellysearch by industry experts. The rewards for getting online classified advertising right seem promising. A survey in April from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (http://digbig.com/4ytpr) shows that the number of online adults who have used online classified ads has more than doubled in the past four years, from 22% in 2005 to 49% now, with 9% visiting an online classified site on any given day, compared with just 4% in 2005. But this doesn’t alter the fact that, for the traditional players (and Kelly’s is over 200 years old), the transition could be tough. Reed Elsevier had to bring Kelly’s parent Reed Business Information back onto its books after failing to find a buyer (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16562) – and announcing Yell’s year-end results for 2008-09 recently (http://digbig.com/4ytmd and follow links), Chief Financial Officer John Davis acknowledged that the 38% growth in that company’s online revenues had merely offset serious downward pressure on print.

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