Good old Friday Ad. Founded in 1975, it’s part of my childhood, the place my folks sold stuff they didn’t need, everything from old cars to litters of kittens. The 1970s were grim and difficult, especially up north in Middlesbrough where we lived, and I suspect FA played a part in keeping our family solvent. So I’ve always had a soft spot for it.
Thirty seven years and still going strong
37 years on they print 400,000 copies of Friday-Ad every week, which are read by more than a million people. They’re Britain’s biggest independent publisher and more than 20,000 businesses advertise their products and services in the paper.
Thriving online
They’ve weathered the online revolution extremely well too, meeting it head on by launching an easy-to-use and popular internet presence in double-quick time. Now it’s one of the UK’s leading classified websites, jammed with good stuff including over 362,000 online ads. It generates 226,000 visitors and two and a half million page impressions a week, and covers every product and service in the known universe as well as thousands of bargain ‘for sale’ items in your local area.
A brilliant money saving and making email newsletter
Their newsletter is a little masterpiece. It’s great, tapping into the Zeitgeist by delivering a load of excellent money saving ideas and tip-offs, ways to generate cash and genuinely interesting and eccentric bits and bobs. The 4th September issue, Frugal Living – How to Live Cheaply with Friday Ad, for example, contains links to articles about:
- How to live cheaply at University
- September selling trends – how to save and make money on Friday Ad
- Friday Ad People – Weird and wonderful stuff for sale from their users in the Bizarre Bazaar
- Tip Offs – Top tips for selling and making money
Here’s where to sign up
It’s well written, fun, useful and relevant, all hallmarks of an excellent newsletter. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s well worth signing up. Here’s a link to the Friday Ad site. Alternatively, if you type sign up for Friday Ad newsletter into your browser search box, your search engine will automatically direct you to your local site – ours is Lewes – where you can sign up. Either way, the form is about half way down the page’s left hand column.
