First there was a proliferation of places to view classifieds, then there were the aggregators such as Oodle and Indeed, which made it convenient to find classifieds, but what if you wanted to place in an add in all these places? It’s not easy if you’re posting a job, for example, to hit all the sites you might want to target. It takes time, and there’s no common way ads are collected. I recently faced this with posting my house for sale, where I hit craigslist, Google Base, PennySaver, Lycos, and Yahoo! Real Estate, which was time consuming. Now there are companies springing up to collect your ad once and distribute it across multiple sites. What an obvious idea. And just one more way newspapers get disintermediated. Of course, newspapers could partner with one of these sites and theoretically reach more people willing to place ads, but giving up a bite of the revenue, of course.