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T&E abandoning print -- a smart move?

Yesterday I, like thousands of others, received an email from the publishers of the once-iconic classified advertising paper Trade & Exchange.

This email said (in part):

"As from the end of November we are closing our Trade & Exchange papers in both Auckland and Wellington and concentrating solely on our online service at www.te.co.nz."

A decade or so ago, I used to buy the T&E every week and scour its pages for a good deal. On a number of occasions I also sold unwanted bits and pieces through the free paper, with great success.

I must admit though, that I hardly bothered with their online service.

Browsing through the ink-stained pages of a hardcopy while sitting on the toilet or relaxing in the afternoon sun is a whole different experience to trawling screen after flickering screen of a website.

The other impediment to my regular use of the T&E website was the fact that you had to pay a subscription to view the very latest listings -- otherwise you only got those from the previous edition of the periodical.

Well on receiving the T&E email I decided to revisit the site and see what had changed in all those years of my absence.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was no demand for money if I wanted to browse recent listings.

So, given that listings are also free and there's no success fee -- how do they make money?

Clearly those companies which are using T&E as a commercial storefront will be hit with charges, as will individuals who list more than the allocated number of free items per week -- but is this enough?

Well maybe it is -- especially now that they've ditched the print edition.

By moving everything online (and thus totally automating it), Cabbage Tree Press (publishers of T&E) have really slashed the snot out of their operating costs and it would appear that these savings are effectively passed on to the user.

Now I have to admit that I kind of like the way that Cabbage Tree has operated this publication over the years. They deserve to succeed and I wonder if this latest shift away from dead trees so as to be fully committed to cyberspace might be the best thing they could do in order to meet the challenge that TradeMe has posed to them.

My only concern would be that they've foregone just a little too much revenue -- leaving them very little to play with when it comes to expanding the operation and exploring new avenues for growth.

However, I can see a number of avenues where they could really get stuck in and become to NZ what Craigs List is to the USA -- knocking TM around in the process.

Let's hope that Cabbage Tree Press has made the right move here. The unfortunate thing is that, now they've abandoned print, they really will have one huge battle on their hands against the might of TM and its parent Fairfax.

Did you used to buy the old hardcopy edition of T&E?

Have you ever used the online version?

Do you think that, in its current form, the online-only version of T&E can survive now that it's going fairly and squarely up against TM and Fairfax?

Will the loss of that unique print-media readership send T&E into a death-spiral?

Should I offer T&E some of my own ideas that may well just give them some very useful edges in the market?

Related website: T&E Online

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