BF2005.com & Print Advertising

Here’s another example of the democratization of information and how consumers are taking control – whether business (and the media) likes it or not. In the US, Black Friday is a shopathon that happens the day after Thanksgiving (next week). Retailers plaster newspapers with ads showing their Black Friday special deals and discounts. It’s a bonanza for the stores – and its a bonanza for the newspapers… but for how long?

Sites like BF2005.com are becoming a very popular site because they aggregates all the deals that people would normally have to find by scanning the local papers. They get the information partly from research but also from leaks. People send BF2005.com scans and copies of ads that are due to be published in papers and on the web. The site (actually a student) then collects all the ads and deals and publishes them in an orderly and comparable fashion.

The site was getting 200,000 visitors a week before the NY Times wrote about them yesterday! Strangely, he’s received a few letters from retailers asking him to stop – but it makes you wonder why? It’s free advertising! It’s the papers who should be suing! Feels like the beginning of the end of retail print advertising, no? (In fact you with all those retail ads that show in the NYT at the weekend, you wonder why they wrote such a story – anyone want to run a site called New York Sales?? Crikey, someone already does!)

BF2005