These days, it seems like everyone is trying to start an online classifieds business. In the web 1.0 era when online real estate portals were themselves disruptive, their primary competition online was amongst themselves. The offline classifieds players thought that Internet was a fad, so they didn’t really feel the need to invest heavily online.

Now everyone is trying to start some sort of classifieds business online. Media groups have seen the light and are moving and promoting their newspapers (and classifieds sections) online. Directories are trying to monetize their listings now that few Internet-savvy people will search for a business using print Yellow Pages. In particular, a lot of directories are trying to get into local search, with classifieds as a key component of their offering. Social networks like Xing and LinkedIn realise that it might be easier to convince a business executive to pay €200 per month to recruit job candidates than it is to convince her to pay €10 per month for a premium membership, when you can pretty much get all that you need with a basic — that is, free — account. Even Facebook has added a marketplace section.

I started thinking about this recently when TechCrunch UK announced that News Corp. might be interested in buying LinkedIn. The story appears fairly credible, as it’s been picked up by venerable sources such as The New York Times, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher). At first glance, the link between, let’s say, The Wall Street Journal, MySpace, SimplyHired (a US jobs search engine that News Corp has invested in), Globrix (a stealth UK property search engine in which News Corp. invested “millions of pounds” a few weeks ago) and LinkedIn might seem a bit farfetched.

What the hell is Rupert Murdoch thinking?! (That’s the same question people asked when he bought MySpace for $580 million. Now that Facebook has been valued at $15 billion, even though it’s the number 2 social network — MySpace is still number 1 — people are definitely not doubting the wisdom of Murdoch’s strategic investments.)

Well, one clue might be to look at what News Corp. did with SimplyHired and MySpace — SimplyHired powers MySpace’s job board. That’s one way to monetize MySpace’s traffic. Perhaps not coincidentally, SimplyHired also powers LinkedIn’s job board. And VentureBeat suggests that the rationale behind News Corp’s interest in LinkedIn is as a way to monetize the Wall Street Journal’s traffic once Murdoch removes the subscription model (Murdoch plans to make the Journal free, like the New York Times, which is now free and based on an advertising model — note that the New York Times is an investor in Indeed, SimplyHired’s primary competitor and another vertical search player).

In the VentureBeat author’s words: “News Corp.’s strategy, from what we understand: Somehow integrate LinkedIn’s network with the Wall Street Journal as well as its other newspapers around the world, hopefully figuring out how to recoup News Corp.’s newspapers’ declining classified ad revenue in the process.”

And Swisher’s description of LinkedIn is instructive: “[LinkedIn] is trying to be a business classified service with online presence and connection elements woven in.”

So this means that going forward, the online portals like ImmoScout and Idealista are going to face increasing competition from:

• powerful media groups like News Corp., The New York Times Company and Axel Springer, all of which need to move online to deal with declining offline classifieds revenues;
• the Yellow Page giants, which need to conquer local search or become irrelevant; and
• the social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Xing, which find it difficult to monetise their traffic and are looking to classifieds as one possible solution.

In short, the classifieds space is becoming very fragmented.

In such a context, a property search engine like nuroa makes increasing sense. Why would a user want to search site by site, format by format, giant by giant, when she can encounter all of the relevant information in one place?

Maybe that’s why vanguardist media groups like News Corp and the New York Times are eagerly investing in vertical search engines, aware of their monetisation potential in the increasingly fragmented world of online classifieds.

For those of you who are generally interested in social networks like LinkedIn, I’ve included an interview with Dan Nye, the new CEO of LinkedIn. Intruders TV also has an interesting interview with Reid Hoffman (but they don’t allow you to embed the video).

Dan Nye (new CEO) of LinkedIn speaks with Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal