If I had any doubts about the inevitable decline of printed newspapers and magazines, they were dispelled last week. First, while following the story of the new Apple iPhone, I was drawn to the site Gizmodo.com, where in addition to the details of the phone, I noticed a sitemeter icon and clicked it (sitemeter is a popular Web site traffic reporting and analysis tool).
Gizmodo received more than 4 million page views the week I visited and was on track to have 20 million page views (and a like number of visitors) for the month of January. No US print publication has 20 million readers that I’m aware of, and certainly Gizmodo’s costs of delivery are a lot lower than if were a print publication. For the last year, Gizmodo has never had less than 10 million page views a month. Just spectacular. You can see its site statistics here. 
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend an iBreakfast special event with Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org, the world's leading online classified advertising site and community. Along with the lore of the early days of Craig’s List, he talked about the current state of the business, its relationship with newspapers, which have the most to lose to Craig’s List free classifieds, and his support for journalism as it responds to the new opportunities online.
For marketers, perhaps the most intriguing statistic was that in January 2007, craigslist.com expects to receive 6 billion page hits, one for every human on the planet. Newmark was unapologetic about his small company’s (they have 23 employees) impact on old media. Also interesting is that the "Craig’s list effect" has not been as profound outside the US, at least not yet. Newmark mentioned that while London was coming along OK, it wasn’t growing all that fast.
A short reprieve for UK and Europe. But the clock is ticking...
Newspapers in the UK and Europe are fortunate that since Craig’s List is not an aggressive marketer, they still have the opportunity to put strategies in place to blunt the effect of this company on their businesses. They can and should use their proprietary content and relationship with their readers to get in front of this juggernaut, motivating their readers to use their Web sites to post classifieds and create a community in the same manner as one does on craigslist.com.
Crystal ball time.
My prediction is that the days are numbered for the printed newspaper. Digital distribution of news, on a new class of handheld device called electronic paper, will make digital content as portable as current newspapers or magazines. I figure that by 2011 daily newspapers will be moving from paper to digital-only formats with many newsmagazines not far behind. The next few years will be a painful transition to all-digital delivery, with continued contraction in old media companies that fail to embrace the new mechanism and create business models that make it profitable. And new, all-Internet news organizations, and the old media companies that innovate successfully, will expand to fill the void.
Thanks to Rick Maiman, photojournalist, for the photo of Craig Newmark. Rick can be reached at 917 405-8416 or nyp797@gmail.com.
