Craigslist, the world’s largest classified ads platform, was rolled out in a staggered fashion from 1995 to 2009.
This created the perfect testing ground for its impact on 1,500 US daily newspapers.
Researchers found that:
As one would expect local newspapers reduced staff by 6% (14% for those that relied more heavily on classified ads).
There was also a sharp decline in circulation which isn’t made up by other sources of news consumption.
Most fascinating though, there was a significant decline in political content of newspapers (see chart) while things like sport, entertainment and crime didn’t change.
This has very stark implications discussed in the link.
