Spanish Classifieds Axe Print Version

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.