The Inland Empire advertisers in the PennySaver are a pound poorer this week, due to the closing of the 50-year-old coupon print magazine. It may be fitting that on my last issue the top banner ad is for a Memorial Day sales event.
It’s also ironic that the largest advertiser on the front page, Redlands Village Dentistry was having their Grand Opening. Picture above is my copy of the last PennySaver from the Redlands North East region in California.
The California workers in Brea and Mira Loma were shocked on Friday, May 22, 2015 to learn that their print advertisement company had gone under. Around 680 employees were let go on this day. Even though they were shocked, there were indicators this would eventually happen.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “The Newspaper Association of America reports classified advertising revenue fell 10.5 percent in 2013. However, Craigslist revenue grew 30 percent to $166.5 million that same year.”
The San Diego U-T is no stranger to patrons turning away from the printed page either as they have undergone several mergers since 1992.
The PennySaver plight, as I see it, is a sign of the times. Print Yellow Pages have lost ground to online advertising for over a decade now. Mail has given away to email.
And besides Craigslist, consumers have been continually turning to Amazon Local and Groupons to find local deals. Websites plus PPC or SEO (my favorite) have taken away market-share from print newspaper advertising and other forms of advertising.
With the staple of PC’s and Mac’s in consumer’s home and with the rise of smartphones and tablets, local online advertising will only continue to grow.
But, I must say R.I.P. Pennysaver as, over the years, I have gotten good deals on oil changes, home improvement projects and miscellaneous sporting goods from you.
And to you, former Pennysaver advertisers, well you know where to turn in order to keep your doors open and customers walking in. It’s a sign of the times.
Nicely written Kevin, and good insights. I think it’s appropriate to also point out what a poor job YP.com has done in creating the on-line equivalent of the Yellow Pages even though they had the ultimate ‘.com’ address and proprietary information from the very beginning of the ‘.com’ race. Can someone say, “complacency”?
People needed then and still need now, a cohesive on-line local product/service finder reference; that’s ‘reliable’. Google comes close, but with all their data mining expertise they skew the search results in favor of their paid advertisers so much that some ‘non-paying’ listings don’t even show up in the search.
The information Super Highway has so many billboards that the average traveler has trouble seeing the road.
Drive carefully my friends.
Well said, Gregg. Google, Yelp, Foursquare, MerchantCircle and a few others are trying to be the one-stop shopping for local search (and maybe even Craigslist should make this list as well). But, so far, there is no one online destination that does it all. We’ll have to wait and see how the battle for this online turf unfolds in the coming months and years.
Goes to show you, I didn’t miss the Penny Saver until I needed to check on some coupon deals