Mark Potts, in his Recovering Journalist blog, posts on the threat Yelp poses to the entertainment listings of the newspaper and muses that it represents the same sort of squeeze that Craigslist did.
"The last really defensible franchise for newspapers is local news and information, and local entertainment, dining and business listings and guides are a critical part of that franchise—especially in the ways they can attract advertisers," he writes. But if Yelp is providing a better, easier to use mousetrap, just as craigslist did with classifieds, newspapers are going to lose big. Yet again."
Classified advertising represents a significant portion of revenue. Thus, Craiglist, Kijiji and others pose serious disruption to the economic model of newspapering.
Entertainment listings, meanwhile, are not a vein of revenue. They are more of a reader service and do not attract advertisers in the same way. Undoubtedly any service that takes an audience away is a threat, but of a list of priorities for a newspaper today, defending that category would not likely rate highly.
Most papers also are examining new ways to generate listings online, either on their own or in conjunction with the many existing services that scrape, aggregate and enable easy search of them.
