The Classified Ads

 Recently I took down a book and found in it a cartoon I had clipped out something over thirty-five years ago. The cartoon remains mildly amusing. The other side of the paper, of no interest then, is of more interest now: it is all classified ads for used cars. The columns don't quite align with the edges of the cartoon, making estimation less accurate. Still, I think that 4.25" x 3.5" is the equivalent of twenty-eight or thirty classified ads. The sheet that held the ads would have had a printable area of 20" x 12", roughly sixteen times the size of the cartoon. That would give around 450 classifieds on that page.

I haven't placed a classified ad in The Washington Post in many years. My recollection is that a small classified cost something around $10 per day in early 1980s dollars. If so, each such page of classifieds would have been worth around $4500 then: multiplied by 365 days, call it $1.6 million. The newspapers used to carry an awful lot of pages of ads, but given the revenues of newspapers in those days, that still seems low.

 The classified ads are gone to the web, and the revenues have dried up. Twenty-odd years ago, a week's worth of The Washington Post and The New York Times would fill two grocery bags tightly when I bagged them for recycling. Now many weeks I fill one bag, or could if I cared to take the chance of it splitting. Some of the old volume was the ads themselves, some was the content it paid for.