Traditionally, advertising is a money gulping venture and over centuries small, medium and big enterprises have expended whopping sums of money in keeping up their awareness drive leveraging on the traditional model of advertising which includes placing TV, radio, street signs and print adverts. Most importantly, these organizations have depended on these platform and system to scale up sales, increase market share or improve awareness.

With the boom of the internet came a faster, cheaper and easily accessible means of advertising and reaching out directly to more people which includes Paid Social Advertising (PSA), Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Impression (PPM), email marketing etc. However, as organizations and individuals throng the internet to pucker a share of what online advertising offers and make good use of the world’s most influential and emerging advertising niche, sooner, they have also realized that sustaining the cost of online advertising will by no-small way mean a lot to their overhead.

This livid reality pushes into the foray online classifieds – Online classifieds is an advertising concept dominated by newspapers for more than a century. The concepts allow individuals or organizations to make small low-cost ads in newspapers and once the internet came and was properly saturated classified transfigured into an online entity that today has become a very strong advertising platform and alternative.

Conversely, while classified revenue has been dwindling at newspapers houses all over the country and abroad, an increasing amount of online businesses, both well-established ones and the newbies, are increasingly heading the way of classified sites as a pacifier for reducing online advertising spend. This reality has seen a rise in the amount of enterprise users and also a steady user volume of induvial users of classified sites.

Online traffic to classified sites like jiji.ng, Postwanga.ng and olx.com.ng, meanwhile, has grown 20 percent, to more than 19 million unique visitors from January to April this year, up from around 15 million a year previously, giving to a marketplace study by ComScore. This very useful market research data shows that classified sites which is a free alternative to its regular and paid online counterpart is upwardly growing and steadily thriving, this which is due to it’s easy to use interface, know-how and its free or affordability model.

In no small way, the classified marketplace has turned progressively updated, these updates come in form of add-ons that gives users more to chew and benefit from as a rising amount of businesses hunt for the finest method to shift from big-spend offline traditional adverts into seemingly less complex and cost-saving web alternatives. Strategically, this goal has been well accomplished and continuously sits on a burgeoning trajectory. 

If you're a vendor, a merchandiser, a business (big, small or medium); today what is evolving in the classified realm are two basic approaches. One has simply been the shift from traditional classifieds model to the internet, amassing ads to a single site that give users more creative options. The other encompasses issuing the amassed adverts to as many internet sites as possible. This is the future of online advertising, I deeply believe and know this because it is free, easy to use and it keeps evolving.