But in the US, newspaper publishers have been slow to participate – perhaps they believe 100% of “not much” is worth more than 50% of “plenty” – but LiveDeal’s new partnership with AdStar should move things along. Under the deal, once a customer has placed an online ad, the AdStar software can automatically format and send that same ad to the local participating newspaper for its print edition.

LiveDeal currently attracts more than 1.4 million unique visitors a month with ad listings worth more than $5 billion – it’s biggest and most successful category, somewhat surprisingly, is pets.

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Newspapers Start To Produce Better Numbers From Their Print Operations, and Their Internet Activities Continue Amazing Growth, But Three Major Wall Street Analysts Say Its Way Too Early To Say The Worst Is Over
The New York Times in May posted its highest monthly growth increase so far this year, 4.4% compared with last May and online ad revenue was up 27%. The Wall Street Journal reported its May advertising was up 10.1%, but for all that Wall Street analysts say they want to see more than one month of good figures before giving any thumbs-up for the industry.

The Good News For Newspapers Is that More People Than Ever Before Are Reading Their Online News Sites. The Bad News Is that One of Their Major Advertising Sectors – Automotive – Is Moving Much Of Its Spend to The Web, Too, But Not Necessarily To Newspaper Sites
US newspaper web sites continued to attract web crowds in record numbers during Q4, 2005 as some 35% of all active US web users spent time on a newspaper site. But that is about the only thing newspapers can find to celebrate, and with print circulations still in decline, and revenues basically flat there is now the added dose of bad news that newspaper classified automobile advertising has taken a nosedive, and all the signs are things will get worse, not better.

Now There Is A Way For Newspapers to Compete With Craigslist. Say Hello to LiveDeal
Newspapers know they stand to lose billions of dollars in classified advertising revenue to Craigslist, and many publishers have simply no idea how to compete against free ads. But now comes along LiveDeal, a Craigslist competitor that actually encourages newspapers to turn over their classifieds to a site LiveDeal will run for them on a revenue share basis. It’s aimed at local readership within a 50-mile radius of local postal codes, but it extends nationwide.

Wall Street Has Coined a New Term For the Advertising Difficulties Facing Traditional Media: Welcome to “Media Malaise”
With nearly all the traditional media advertising pointers for the rest of the year looking particularly sick, trust Wall Street to introduce the term that sums it all up. “Media Malaise” is forecast to be with us for some time to come!

As If Metro Was Not Already Giving Publishers Heartburn by Taking Their Younger Readers
Now It Is Going For the Jugular Targeting Classified Advertising Revenues By Converging With New Web Sites.

More about LiveDeal

Under the new AdStar deal, when a LiveDeal customer posts an ad online there is also an option of publishing the ad within the print edition of the participating local newspaper by using the AdStar print ad placement platform. The print ad is created automatically using the information within the online classified ad, the software automatically formatting the ad for the selected newspaper, matching the LiveDeal category with the newspaper’s appropriate category, and submitting the finished ad to the newspaper’s publishing system for print and online publication.

“Developing strategies for bridging the gap between the offline and the online worlds is one of our main focus areas,” said Rajesh Navar, founder and ceo of LiveDeal. “With our new alliance with AdStar, LiveDeal users can straddle these two worlds to maximize the power of their online listings by having a print counterpart in their local newspapers.

“And newspapers can create a much-needed new revenue stream. We see this as a win-win all around since it taps into the strengths of both of these channels – the usability and immediacy of the Internet and the local brand equity of the newspapers,” Rajesh concluded.

The LiveDeal relationship with newspapers is simple – offer an online classified ad site that is searchable by postal code, with a 50 mile (80km) radius. LiveDeal becomes the newspaper’s online classified presence, responsible for the site’s various features and maintenance, while the newspaper concentrates on getting the ad in the first place.

The main difference between LiveDeal and, say, Craigslist is that Craigslist is not into partnering with newspapers – rather it seems more bent on succeeding at the expense of the classified business of newspapers, as the San Francisco Chronicle will quickly attest.

Major US newspaper groups, Gannett and Tribune, for instance, have success with their own national online classified sites like CareerBuilder, but participation in such sites does not shut out a newspaper from participating with LiveDeal on the local level.

In Canada, for instance, the Toronto Star and has its own very successful recruitment site, workopolis.com, that it owns with two competitors, the Globe and Mail and Gesca, but that hasn’t stopped the Star from starting LiveDeal successfully in Canada.

LiveDeal is more into the “try this out before you buy” business. With a 50-mile radius if people want to try something before they buy it it’s not a big deal whereas if the customer was across the country then it’s something else.

While LiveDeal’s newspaper business in the US is minimal – it’s not easy to sell a newspaper publisher that there is a better way to do local classifieds than by one’s own site -- its overall business is growing quickly. According to comScore, LiveDeal’s site traffic has grown 163% in the 12-month period to March, 2006, with monthly traffic since the beginning of the year up 57% for its main categories – pets, real estate, autos and furniture.

With the Kelsey Group forecasting that local online classifieds are expected to grow from the $3.5 billion in 2005 to more than $9.8 billion in 2010, and newspapers seeking every way they can to cut costs and increase margins, then the new LiveDeal arrangement with AdStar should be worth looking into. A new Kelsey report released this week strongly recommends that newspapers should partner with Internet online players.

"Partnering with online players to etch out a strategy is something that we've seen work, and we recommend that partnering with an online player is a good move," said Michael Boland, senior analyst with the Kelsey Group and one of the report’s authors.

"While newspaper advertising and classifieds have been traditionally based on leading offline conversions, new technologies are being developed to enable them to better reach new and existing customers online," it said. "This is a unique opportunity to bring traditional strengths in circular, classified, and display advertising to new online channels."

With online classifieds forecast to grow at the Kelsey forecasts, then one must assume that some of that business will come from the pockets of print editions. How to protect that revenue?

One way would certainly be to have an arrangement with an online classified player, especially one that has software in place to encourage the online advertiser to also place the ad in the print edition, making it very simple to do by taking all the necessary information from the online ad.

That would seem to be exactly the type of business convergence that local newspapers should be lining up to take advantage of.

LiveDeal Ties Up With AdStar – Now An Online Ad Can Be Automatically Fed to the Local Newspaper’s Print Edition

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