I have just listed an apartment for sale and was talking with the real-estate agent over the weekend about the marketing strategy. Whereas in 2005 he used a mix of newspapers and online, he has made the decision to go 100% online this year. For him online is 5% of the cost of newspapers and he can still charge the customer around the same price. So it’s a margin proposition. I’ll leave the ethics of the charge to the customer for another time because what interests me here is the decision to turn his back on print altogether. He’s done his homework on where leads are generated and he says that leads from newspapers cost at least 20 times than of online and even then most of the newspaper leads would have found their way to him through the online advertising anyway.
No wonder Saturday newspaper sales are down.
As my real-estate agent friend said “as far as real-estate is concerned, newspapers are dead”.
It gives me no joy to pass on this story. Howerer, we cannot ignore the reality. The challenge is to repkace newspaper driven relevance of newsagencies with other products and services and to do this quickly.
Mark, thanks for this, and for this blog. It is interesting to see, but it is true, print is dying fast. I believe it won’t go away however IT will evlove into something else altogether…
Now almost a year old, here is the writing on the wall:
http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/10/news/
Cheers,
Kevin