Spanish Classifieds Axe Print Version
November 18, 2008 by Emma Sorensen
Iconic Spanish classifieds newspaper, Segundamano, is set to shut down its print versions and go solely online.
Segundamano has been going for around 30 years, and is a leader in the Spanish online real estate market with its property portal fotocasa.es.
News of the shutdown was reported in several English and Spanish blogs last week.
Segundamano is owned by the Norwegian company, Schibsted Classifed Media (SCM), who claim to be the biggest in Europe with respect to online classified advertising.
SCM also has activities in Sweden, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. It reports turnover was EUR 123 million as of 30 June 2008 and its operations have more than 1,500 employees.
In its Interim Third Quarter Report, Schibsted said:
Schibsted Classified Media (the former Trader companies) had Q3 operating revenues of EUR 38.4 million, 19% less than in Q3 2007. The decline is primarily due to the negative trend for print publications in Spain.
In Spain, the operating revenues from print publications fell by 54%. The closure of titles accounted for 5-10 percentage points of this reduction. It has been decided to close down all the Spanish print classified ads operations from November 2008. This will lead to restructuring costs of EUR 10 million, which will be expensed in Q4. The restructuring is partly related to a head count reduction of 217, which totals EUR 7 million of the restructuring cost.
In contrast, the report revealed growing online figures, stating that “The operating revenues of the Spanish online activities increased by 21% in Q3.”
According to recent information from comScore, fotocasa.es leads the Spanish online market with over 1 million visitors, and despite the dire real estate market in Spain the online sector has seen an increase in activity with more than 3 million Spanish people visiting a real estate website during September.
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Schibsted, the Norwegian media company behind leading Spanish real estate portal fotocasa.es as well as a number of other jobs and classifieds websites, has released its financial results for the third quarter of 2009. The company’s operating profit jumped 52 percent to NOK 303 million, which was due to what Schibsted calls “a significant contribution” from its profitability program as well as “continued growth in online activities”....
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Norwegian media giant Schibsted has reported that classifieds and directories are its fastest growing channel and has great international online growth opportunities....
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- selltube.com Online Video Classifieds
With print classifieds dying a slow death, could online video classifieds be the next big thing?...
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Schibsted axed another of its classified print newspapers: “Soov”, this time in Estonia. The decision was done in September.
At the same time, they are pooling more money into advertising their online version: http://www.soov.ee
Soov.ee is a generic classifieds web portal, which has a real estate section; their real estate section had 13% of the Estonian market according to June poll.
Estonia’s biggest real estate portals is owned by Finnish Alma Media group, the second biggest was acquired by the UK’s Tradus Group in spring this year.
[...] in non English speaking countries, we’re seeing changes. A 30 year old Spanish paper going completely digital, although it was just a buy-sell-swap issue from what I can make out [...]
[...] and consumers increasingly move online. Last November Schibsted Classifed Media decided to close down the print operations of its 30 year old Spanish classifieds newspaper, Segundamano, taking it solely [...]