Opportunities
A colleague and all-around nice guy and I were talking about very intellectual hypothetical scenarios at work today. Some of the obvious ones were things like “It’s 1998 and you could either try and convince AOL to invest in high-speed internet or go lead Comcast’s efforts, which would you do?” You know, really lofty stuff.
But then he posed this question – “If it was 2000 and you could either try and convince newspapers to switch to free classifieds or go start Craigslist, which would you do?” Of course, the obvious answer would be to convince newspapers to accept the idea of free classifieds. And of course, that’s clearly not what happened.
Why not? Because the idea of free classified would have been some wacky shit. Classifieds were the backbone of their operations. Without them, the entire advertising structure would fall apart. Why would newspapers ever give them away?
Now we all know that happened anyway, and before you go all “Jonathan, we covered the decimation of newspaper classifieds 6 years ago,” let me tell you something: My paper JUST started offering free classifieds. Except in print only. And you don’t get any photos. And you still have to figure out how to abbreviate “Yellow couch, slightly creaky, sodden, and has a cat piss stain on the left arm” into 30 characters.
See my point? The internet figured this shit out 8 years ago, and our efforts to match decade-old technology still falls embarrassingly short.
So what other “impossible” ideas remain to be adopted in order to keep this industry afloat?