Earlier this month online monitoring firm Hitwise found that visits to classifiedadvertising websites were booming, with visits to such sites in the US up 84% on the same time last year.
Some of the biggest threats to newspaper profits have come from Web sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, onlineadvertising venues that are chipping away at newspapers' classified ad sections.
In the consumer-driven market for classifiedadvertising, for instance, ordinary people instinctively grasped the efficiencies of online sites such as Craigslist, thus causing a drop in classified revenues at newspapers.