Accessing the Quality of Online Classified Websites: An Empirical Study of the 100 Largest Newspapers

The use of websites and web applications to advertise, inform and to execute business transactions has become a standard practice in our modern economy. Customers expect every form of organization that they interact with to develop a web presence. Newspaper organizations cannot afford to overlook this phenomenon for two reasons. First, these organizations compete in the marketplace by being the first to publish information. Since the Internet is especially fitting for speedy publication of information, news organizations of all types must to use this media. Second, which might be a more compelling reason, is that consumers are using the Internet as an information resource. It is therefore important for Newspaper publishers to integrate this media into their business. This study focuses on how Newspaper organizations are using or not using the Internet to publish rental ads. The study of this niche is interesting because it is a profitable area of the firms. This study evaluated the web sites of the 100 largest US daily newspapers to document the level of quality of these sites. The quality criteria of intrinsic data quality (DQ), contextual DQ, accessibility DQ and representation DQ were used to evaluate these sites. The results show that while the larger organizations have better sites than smaller ones, that quality improvement of these sites is needed across the board. INTRODUCTION This study of the 100 largest US Newspapers occurred partly because of the need to use online classifieds to assess rental properties in Boston area. It became apparent that some web sites were just too poorly designed to be useful. Due to our data quality experience, the decision to study classified ads was rather natural. It was natural to apply data quality expertise to classified ads. This study appears to be the only one focused exclusively on the quality of online classified rental properties. This study is important both from the customer’s, the provider's and the web-programmer's viewpoint. It is hoped that this study would create an impetuous for the discussion of programming improvements for electronic classified ads. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) estimates that the market for classifieds ads is $16.8 billion. Almost all of this revenue is from print classifieds. Typically classified ads make up between 3540% of the total revenues of a daily newspaper. The NAA also estimates that there are more than 1,000 employment, 900 real estate and 500 automotive web sites offering classifieds-type information. From a competitive standpoint every provider of electronic classifieds on the web is competing with other providers of print-based classifieds. It is reasonable to expect that the quality of online classifieds ads could give a producer competitive advantage over other competitors. High levels of quality would also benefit users of such services since they would find their information in efficient and cost-effective ways. The results of this empirical study would describe the quality levels of online rental classifieds is a first step towards their future improvements. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information Quality