The latest “what’s Google going to do with the money” chatter claims the search engine company will enter the classified advertising market.
Forget about paying for a classified ad listing. The next generation classifieds advertiser will be handled by Google, with payment likely rendered for ad performance rather than ad placement.
The research firm Classified Intelligence, which focuses on the classified advertising market, notes in a statement that Google has been talking to firms about providing those kind of ads. It’s a lucrative market, as Jupiter Research notes about 70 percent of local online advertising spending through 2010 will be on classifieds.
In their report, Classified Intelligence claims Google has been talking with companies like CareerBuilder.com. Google doesn’t want to provide standard search results indexed from those sites, which would not be a timely method of delivering classifieds.
Instead, Google is very interested in picking up direct feeds from classified ad sites. Listings from those feeds would find their way into search results. Google’s entry into the field would have some impact on the other players, like newspapers as well as pure Internet plays like Craigslist, Classified Intelligence noted:
“Anytime an online giant like Google does something of this magnitude, it’s going to change the classified landscape and up the ante for everyone else in the field,” said said Peter M. Zollman, founding principal and executive editor of Classified Intelligence LLC.
“It’s not about threat or blessing. It’s about changing online choices, about new options for consumers, and about companies competing to provide better services to buyers and sellers.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
