May 11, 2012
The “freemium” business model is now the growing global default for classified ad business models — where the ad is free but the advertiser can pay a small fee for highlighting it, promoting it, extending it or otherwise making it more prominent.
Enter Facebook.
Just a few days before its initial public offering, Facebook is testing a freemium model for classifieds and other “highlighted posts.”
(We learned about it from...
April 23, 2012
Traffic to U.S. websites that publish escort and body-rub ads hit a record in March, while five of those sites sold at least $3.2 million in online prostitution ads during the month.
March revenue from online prostitution ads increased 2 percent from the previous month and 8.6 percent from March 2011, according to estimates by the AIM Group, and it was just $60,000 short of the record set in January.
There were 6.1 million unique visits to 22 tracked sites, according to...
April 16, 2012
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March 22, 2012
Online prostitution advertising generated at least $3.1 million in revenue in February on five U.S. websites, an increase of 9.8 percent compared with the same month last year, but a drop of 3.8 percent from a record high in January.
Nearly 80 percent of the revenue was attributed to Backpage.com, which generated at least $2.5 million from the sale of online ads for escorts and body rubs in 23 U.S. cities. February prostitution-ad revenue at Backpage.com increased 36.5 percent...
March 21, 2012
- The Chicago Reader, for decades one of America's most respected and profitable alternative weeklies, is for sale again, its troubles attributed to dramatic declines in classified ad revenues. The proximate cause: free ads offered by such competing web outlets as Craigslist. "Once [classified revenues] dried up," commented Charles Whitaker, a professor at Medill journalism school, "there was just no place else for them to turn."
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