Online Photo Ads are
Big Business for LA Times

Classified ads are a key source of revenue for newspapers, traditionally accounting for up to 50% of their revenues. The Internet’s ability to instantly connect buyers and sellers offers the promise of a “frictionless” medium that greatly boosts transaction volumes. 

But adding pictures to Internet classifieds has until recently been a complex, cumbersome task. Most sellers, lacking the technical expertise, typically give up.  Since pictures are integral to selling items through classifieds, the Internet promise has remained tantalizing and unfulfilled.

The LA Times faced these issues at its Recycler.com division, the leading regionally operated classified site serving Southern California, with over 12 million monthly page views and approximately 100,000 items for sale at any given time.  Kevin Klein, General Manager of Recycler.com decided to address them by making it dramatically easier for advertisers to include pictures with their online submissions.

In November of 2001, Recycler.com implemented an outsourced image management system which dramatically simplifies the process for both the seller, and Recycler.com. “By the very next month, we observed a 50% increase in the number of photos added to the site, and it’s kept going up sinc” says Joseph Shavit, Director of Classified Marketing at LA Times. “Thanks to the ease of use, people who previously wouldn’t have submitted a picture are now doing it, and more photos of for sale items are being taken”. Coincidentally inexpensive film-to-digital conversion services have become widely available in the same period, and digital cameras have come significantly down in -price making a digital camera a sales tool that pays for itself in a matter of months.

Increasing visual content addresses a core value for the LA Times, Recycler and Recycler.com. Says Shavit: “Users come to our web site with a transaction in mind. Whether they’re just browsing or actually searching for something, photo ads provide a level of experience that non-photo ads don’t. We need to ensure that our users get the best possible experience – that also bears on user loyalty, and frequency of visits.” Since implementing the image serving solution, Recycler.com has experienced a revenue growth of 225% for its online photo ads, with profits increasing by over 35% thus proving to their satisfaction that Visual Communication using infoimaging devices and services means good business.

“For users who come to our web site with a transaction in mind, whether they’re just browsing or actually in the heat of searching for something, photo ads provide a level of experience that non-photo ads don’t,” said Kevin Klein, General Manager of Recycler.com, a division of the LA Times.