Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Week -- "If all the factors responsible for the massive decline of the newspaper industry, Craigslist, the internet's free classifieds page, has long attracted a big share of the blame. So it's no surprise that a new study by Robert Seamans of New York University's Stern School of Business and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School seems, on its face at least, to back up the blame-Craigslist argument. What is surprising is the actual numbers. Analyzing how 1,000 newspapers reacted to the rise of Craigslist from 2000 to 2007, the professors estimated that classified ad buyers saved $5 billion by posting free listings on Craigslist instead of buying ads in newspapers. The obvious corollary here is that newspapers lost the $5 billion that consumers saved, and saw their classified ads business — one of three longstanding revenue pillars, along with circulation revenue and more traditional ads — all but decimated."

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