- Breeding
- Breeding Costs: Things to Consider
- Horse Breeding, Part 2: Breeding and Gestation
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- Buying a Horse
- Cookies With a Clue For Your Horse
- Top 3 Ways Using Horse Classifieds Can Save You Money
- Do you need insurance for horses?
- Horse Feeding
- OmegaTri & the Equine - Reducing Inflammation, Restoring Balance
- Calcium - More than Just Bone
- What Makes Good Hay
- Horse Grooming
- Relive Southern Eighths/Nikon Three-Day on YouTube
- An Overview of Horse Grooming
- Keeping Your Horse Beautiful with Horse Products
- Horse Health Issues
- It’s Getting Cold Out! What to Do With Your Horse
- You’ve Got the Right Feed, Now What?: Proper Feeding Practices
- Old Habits Die Hard
- Horse Training
- So You Bought A Friesian, Now what!
- Training Mythunderstandings: Little Things Do Mean a Lot
- Mythunderstandings About Riding the Trot
- Horses & History
- A Brief History of Horse Breeding
- The Feral Horse and Its Impact
- When Dealing With Horses Get It in Writing - Sign Up for May 16 FREE Webinar
- Horses & Sports
- Ask Chelsie Natural Horsemanship - What Does It Mean To Disengage My Horse?
- Halter Horse Show
- ELITE DINING AND HOSPITALITY CLUB TO DEBUT AT 53rd WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL HORSE SHOW
Paid Horse Ads vs. Free Horse Ads
03/23/2009
So surely, if we’re trying to save money, free horse ads are the way to go, right? Well not necessarily.
Selling a horse isn’t easily on any level: emotionally, intellectually, financially, even physically. The financial aspect is usually what we focus the most on, because if it weren’t for financial necessity, many of us wouldn’t be selling our horses in the first place. So surely, if we’re trying to save money, free horse ads are the way to go, right? Well not necessarily.
Free horse ads always appear on the internet, with the exception of flyers that can be passed out or posted. A paid horse can be placed in a newspaper, a magazine, or even in the same websites that host free horse ads. In the real world, all newspaper and magazine listings are paid for. On the internet, free horse ads are almost always text-only. The addition of one picture is often all it takes to change free horse ads into paid horse ads.
Free horse ads look pretty good when you compare them with traditional print rates. A magazine like Horse Gazette, for example, charges $15 per issue for a small directory listing, with an additional $2 for typesetting. This is the same text-only format you would get in the free horse ads, with arguably the same level of exposure. The smallest box you can buy on a page—a 3.25”X4” black and white ad—will run you $70 per issue, with added production charges for pictures and typesetting. By the time you get to a full page color ad in Horse Gazette you’re looking to pay $720 per issue, not including additional production charges such as picture resizing. After a few issues, the print ad might cost more than the horse sells for!
Online, there are ways to advertise your horse for sale, but few support free horse ads. Unless you’re using Craigslist, you must keep your free horse ads picture-free. Picture supported ads can be placed on free horse ads websites for $60 a year. Banner advertising on a horse-related website could cost you $30 a month. These rates are significantly more than the free horse ads, but significantly less than advertising in a newspaper or magazine.
The trick in deciding between free horse ads and paid horse ads becomes determining exposure and demographics. Something like Horse Gazette reaches 50,000 readers a week, which looks really unimpressive next to the numbers at free horse ads sites like TheHorse.com, which claims millions of users a month. You would be led to think that the picture-free horse ads at online classified websites would be a hands down better choice.
But that’s where demographics come in. Trade magazines like rural classifieds, Horse Gazette, and other local newspapers are read by men and women in their mid-fourties, with income levels above $50,000 a year, who are following the horse market closely. These are serious buyers. Online classifieds hosting free horse ads, for example, are perused by a wider array of less-serious buyers who are interested in a good deal, but not always a good horse. The bargaining on sites that host free horse ads is intense, and you can find yourself paying much less for your horse than your horse might be worth.
Our suggestion? If selling a young, healthy horse with a good pedigree, consider the trade magazines. If selling an older horse with an average pedigree, consider paid online ads. And if you’re trying to get rid of an unhealthy, injured horse as quickly as possible, consider the free horse ads. But remember—in this world, you often get what you pay for.
