HALF OF INTERNET USERS VISIT FREE AD SITES.

While the seismic shift away from print classified advertising has been well understood, it was brought into stark relief last week when the Pew Research Center released a report outlining that the number of adults to use on-line classified ads more than doubled from 2005 to 2009.

Twenty-two percent of adults who used the Internet in 2005 told Pew they had used on-line classifieds, while 49 percent surveyed said they had this year. "On any given day," the report's author, Sydney Jones, wrote, "about a tenth of Internet users (nine percent) visit on-line classified sites, up from four percent in 2005."

The report also highlighted figures from the Newspaper Association of America, showing that classified ad revenue peaked in 1999, when it hit $19.6 billion, and that it had plummeted to just under $10 billion last year.

The Pew report said that Craigslist.org "is by far the most used web site in the United States" for on-line classified advertising, reaching 53.8 million unique visitors in March 2009, up seven percent from February.

The report said that Craigslist and other on-line classified users are predominately young, with 16 percent of all Internet users aged 25-34 using an on-line classified site on a typical day, versus four percent of those aged 55-64.

On-line classified site users also tend to skew higher toward some college or college graduates, and more toward those with household incomes higher than $50,000, the report said.

In other on-line ad news, Advertising Age reported last week that it believes that the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium had "sold nearly $50 million in Yahoo inventory so far."

The Yahoo Newspaper Consortium includes 800 nameplates from around the country and was launched in 2006. Essentially, the consortium allows newspapers to cross-sell on-line advertisers both space on the publishers' web sites as well as on Yahoo sites. Specifically, the program puts local employment advertising on both a newspaper's jobs site as well as on Yahoo's HotJobs site.

The Ad Age article said that about 150 papers are using Yahoo's new APT ad system and that 350 more are scheduled to start with it soon. The magazine said The E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati saw a 30 percent increase in web-only ad sales in the first quarter, which it valued at about $800,000.

That information dove-tailed with statements made by Gary Pruitt, chairman and chief executive of The McClatchy Co. at its annual meeting last week. Pruitt said the publisher is planning a new five-point sales strategy for 2009 that includes the emphasis on on-line employment classified advertising rather than print or a combination of the two.

McClatchy owns a stake in CareerBuilder.com, a major competitor to Yahoo's HotJobs.

Additionally, Pruitt said that the new strategy would include paying commissions to advertising agencies, a practice that had been abandoned. "We haven't done that for years," Pruitt was quoted by the Sacramento Bee as saying.

I continue to believe that much of the decline in ad revenue in recent months is cyclic -- a part of the recession that is besieging all businesses -- the decline in private-party classified ad revenue is also secular, almost all of it going to Craigslist and its ilk. The real question when we exit the recession is how much auto dealership and real estate agency ad revenue will return to traditional publishers (via on-line, mostly, I'm assuming) and how much will go to non-traditional venues?

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