Imagine having a house to sell. You grab your camcorder, walk through the rooms, and post the video on the internet. You and everyone else. Video is the hot thing in classifieds these days.

But here is the question: Where do you post it? You can do it with the local newspaper. Or you can put it up on an independent site.

The difference, a critical one, is that the paper will charge you, whereas the independent site will likely put it up at no charge.

And that's a big problem for American newspapers. How do you hold onto classifieds, and the revenue they generate, when your competitors are giving them away, literally?

New, free video sites, like the month-old realpeoplerealstuff.com, are popping up around the internet as the new big threat to follow sites like CraigsList. They gain their revenue from ads targeting those posting classifieds.

Need to sell a car or a baby bath tub? Want to find a new employee or post a resume? On realpeoplerealstuff.com you can star in a video that can be downloaded to a cell phone, web cam, digital camera or camcorder. And there's no charge.

Compare that with the $90 the Greensboro News and Record charges to run a traditional eight-line print classified that contains a reference number that directs the reader to a web site to view a video tour of your home. The ad runs for two weekends in a row, Saturday and Sunday only.

The worry for newspapers is that free videos will speed up the flight of classifieds from print newspapers, and the paper's web site will be cut out as well.

“There is a huge competitive edge,” says Peter Zollman, founder of Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm that tracks classified advertising. “Print classifieds just don’t work as well as interactive classifieds, and everybody knows that, including newspapers. The goal for newspapers is to try to balance the old with the new.”

Video classifieds first began appearing a decade ago but have only recently begun to take off.

For sure, newspapers still have a major hold on classifieds: $17 billion last year in daily newspaper print classified advertising alone, even years after the rise of free sites like CraigsList.

And their best bet to keep that hold is to offer combo deals where an online ad is paired with a print ad, explains Zollman. There's the immediate revenue, of course, but it also positions the paper to build up its online portion as the dominant local go-to portal, which longer-term is of huge importance.

The first video ads were TV recruitment videos, and they ran in the Arizona Republic a decade ago, the creation of Digital Media Communications. In August 2000, DMC began posting classified videos for the Houston Chronicle, and these days the company claims it's serving video classifieds for more than 140 papers in the U.S. and Canada, including the Greensboro paper, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and the Tampa Tribune.

“Right now we are producing over 4,300 videos a week,” says Evan Neubeiser, DMC’s cofounder and chief executive. “Last year at this time we were doing a little over 3,500, so it’s growing quite substantially.”

Web video ads are two and one half times more effective than a simple photo, either in print or on the web, says Neubeiser. "You should do both. An integrated multimedia strategy is more effective when you are trying to sell a home or a car.”

The question now, with more free sites emerging, is whether newspapers can protect their rates and still manage to hold onto the bulk of the classified business.

Will they have to cut their rates, or maybe even go free themselves? Alan Jacobson sees it as inevitable.

Jacobson heads Brass Tacks Design, a newspaper and classified ad design firm in Norfolk, Va., and he's also a co-founder of realpeoplerealstuff.com. “In 1998 I predicted that classified would migrate online and not to newspapers online," says Jacobson. "You could see the internet taking over.”

He says realpeoplerealstuff.com has approached newspapers with the offer to post their video classified for no charge, only to be turned down, but that now may be changing. He says at least two papers are in the process of teaming up.

The issue is time. With the rush of new video sites, papers will find themselves competing in an already-crowded field, and the risk is they will go unnoticed.

And online video will only grow as more people begin to put videos of more things online.

Houses make sense, and so do cars. But what about a cute video of your daughter's hamster you'd dearly love to say good-bye to?

Says DMC's Neubeiser: "We know classifieds online work better than print, the issue is how soon will people be prepared to put up video ads especially for something small and inconsequential?”