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The Internet The Almighty Buck

Craigslist to Start Charging for Some Listings 131

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the site-abuse-the-same-the-world-over dept.
rufey writes "In the coming months, Craigslist will begin charging fees for some of its listings. New York City real estate listings will be the first to get the fees. Starting on March 1st, it will cost $10 to list real estate on Craigslist for New York City. The fees may not be limited to New York real estate however. Job postings may see fees imposed for various parts of the country. The fees have been proposed as a way to combat the problem of people posting the same thing several times a day to keep their listing near the top of the list."
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Craigslist to Start Charging for Some Listings More

Craigslist to Start Charging for Some Listings

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  • good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:40PM (#14643371) Journal
    sounds like a good idea, it'll make the site better and reduce dupes etc. $10 is such a small amount that it won't put off anyone who wants to use it seriously but will make some dupers reconsider posting the same thing loads... although it might be so small that you could still pay $40 and think it was a good deal for 4 listings... I guess it depends on how much money you think you might make.

  • craigSlist (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:40PM (#14643372)
    make sure you do not omit the "s" in craigslist.

    otherwise it takes you to a page with porn ads.

  • This is not a new thing (Score:5, Informative)

    by licamell ( 778753 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:41PM (#14643374)
    Craigslist has been charging for some things, specifically full time job postings in certain areas, for the past couple of years. I think it is a good thing to keep down the number of spam messages that are being posted in certain sections (Specifically jobs and real estate).

    • Re:This is not a new thing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) <slashdot.kadin@xox y . net> on Saturday February 04, 2006 @10:05PM (#14643968) Homepage Journal
      Yeah I was going to say the same thing.

      I don't understand why this is news. I think until now it was mostly just job postings, but there were definitely listings that cost money on Craigslist, at least in certain markets. I thought NYC was one of them, but perhaps not.

      I've found a few apartments and rooms for rent through Craigslist ... I wonder if roommates wanted and rooms for rent fall under the $10 "real estate" category.
    • Craigslist has been charging for some things, specifically full time job postings in certain areas, for the past couple of years.

      I actually got my last job in Portland (portland.craigslist.com), thanks to Craigslist. The recruiter (who I ended up working closely with on my contract) noted that the money she paid for that posting was considerably cheaper than using Monster or Dice, and that she got lots of good leads on it.

      Thanks Craig! Drinks on me for helping me find work when I was just starting to desp

  • So we're on the internet, right (Score:4, Informative)

    by karmaflux ( 148909 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:41PM (#14643375)
    The summary links to a Washington Post article with no links in it.

    Craigslist can be found at www.craigslist.org [craigslist.org].

    See? That wasn't so hard.

  • Meta-Moderation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigwang ( 67863 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:41PM (#14643376)
    I love craigslist.
    But wouldn't it be effective if people could flag the types of posts that these measures are trying to curb?
    "Flag this message 'dickwad'"

    • Re:Meta-Moderation? (Score:5, Informative)

      by fupeg ( 653970 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:16PM (#14643491)
      You can flag items just as you suggest. Some of the options are "miscategorized", "spam", "prohibited", and "best of." If enough people do it, then it gets removed.

      • Re:Meta-Moderation? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:21PM (#14643505)
        IMHO the flag system on craigslist is severly flawed, though - the messages pretty much vanish, and a user who saw a listing one day has no idea why it's gone the next day. Plus, there are entire communities of self-righteous jackasses who patrol craigslist and flag en masse any post that they don't like. I see this a LOT in the pets classifieds, where some have assigned themselves the pet police and go around removing any posts that offend their (usually quite extreme) sensitivities.

        • Re:Meta-Moderation? (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Some people just don't believe in cock fights, you've got to accept that.
    • But wouldn't it be effective if people could flag the types of posts that these measures are trying to curb?

      People either don't know what flags do, don't care, or not enough of them see it. I've seen blatant scams in all manner of sections that don't get removed for quite some time.

      On the same hand, I've posted stuff warning people about other posts which were blatant ripoffs or scams, and been flagged.

      The one major item I bought from CL was a used iBook that turned out to have a defective logic boar

      • is compelling: Every single person I've talked to about selling stuff says that they'll get 10 replies to an ad, and not a single person will actually show up. But the last two things that I sold on CL I only had to deal with one flake, the second guy came through and on time, as promised. The bad part is the people that flake out don't even call to say they are not coming. It is best to get a cell # or make them call 1 hour before the set time and place, and reconfirm. It is just good practice anyway. Mat
    • This is particular to the Real Estate Section, maybe flagging works elsewhere, but the Real Estate Section is SATURATED with:

      Agents posting Services (and not listing actual Real Estate, there is a separate section for Services)
      Spam advertising cheap Housing, but its really Affiliate links to endless Popup Windows of ads.
      "Browse the MLS Free!" postings which you have to sign up for, but then they sell your name to Real Estate Agents "looking for leads" (there is a guy in my wife's office who pays for the

  • It was bound to happen (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Laura_DilDio ( 874259 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:41PM (#14643377)
    after all, doesn't ebay have a stake in Craigslist?

  • Craigslist has become Spam Central (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:42PM (#14643383) Homepage
    Craiglist has really gone downhill over the last few years. The personals are 80-90% spam, and the other listings have a high spam content as well.

    Anonymous ads without moderation just don't work any more.

  • How can you spell "Craigslist" wrong three times in an article summary...about Craigslist????

  • Expanded Search (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:49PM (#14643405) Journal
    The biggest problem with craigslist, they dont allow extended searchs for more than 1 area. While they have always bitched about global searchs would run the "small town" feeling, its global NOW.. Jobs in point, would be nice if you could search nation wide, people move for work now, get with the times.

    While making some people pay will get rid of multiple posts, thats annoying on high traffic sites.

    I just wish craigslist would actually ask what people want, without the freaking attitude...

    • Re:Expanded Search (Score:2, Informative)

      by mthreat ( 632318 )

      You can do all this on these "vertical" search engines:

      For jobs, indeed.com [indeed.com]
      For real estate, trulia.com [trulia.com]

    • You're correct.

      The search is extremely retarded - as you can search globally but just have to keep switching cities. In other words - they're unloading work the computer should be doing is dumped onto you.

      Ebay (owner of craigslist) can limit searches by radius to zip code, I don't see why craigslist won't implement that.

      People who want to deal locally will still be able to do that (and by default if decided), but especially in the trade of small items - location doesn't matter. Otherwise one of the intern

  • i hear a sucking sound... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by d723 ( 891634 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:05PM (#14643465) Homepage Journal

    Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian has an interesting perspective [sfbg.com] on Craigslist:

    A little background. Mr. Newmark, whom everyone calls "Craig," has created a system of online advertising that has pretty much wiped out traditional daily newspaper classified ads in many of the 115 US markets where he now operates. He's also hurt the alternative press, although the damage to the dailies is deeper. Some say Craig has single-handedly destroyed thousands of newspaper jobs.

    He calls Craigslist the Walmart of classified ads because it siphons money out of the local economy since Craigslist doesn't employ people locally in the markets in which it operates.

    It also seems that one of the reasons Craigslist became the definitive source for online classifieds is because it's FREE for everything except job postings, and job postings is an area where they are not the definitive source. Their product is not incredibly complex. If/when they start to charge, it would be a relatively easy task for someone to build a better free alternative.
    • A "better free alternative" would have a problem with name recognition.
      • Local newspapers already have name recognition, so they could do something like Craigslist to save their classified ad business. It's too late for the SF Bay Area, but not for the other areas that Craigslist hasn't opened in yet.

        Their problem is that Craiglist doesn't make anything like as much money as the newspapers got from print ads. The fees from job (and now housing) ads are enough to make Craig and his colleagues rich, but not enough to support big companies with thousands of full-time employees.
    • It's just the redistrabution of information, which some people can't seem to accept is now very easy to the point of being almost free. Ya'know like music distrabution. Don't like the fact that your job got taken over by a machine? Tell it to someone in the UAW.

    • Try combining your two statements (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @08:59PM (#14643795) Homepage
      I find your two statements interesting together.

      1. craigslist has wiped out much of the traditional classified ads industry
      2. If craigslist starts charging, someone will take their place

      It seems to me that 1 plus 2 equals that the traditional classified industry is dead, not because of craigslist specifically, but because the technology that made it possible.

    • Re:i hear a sucking sound... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @09:44PM (#14643896)
      He compares Craigslist to Wal*Mart because he writes for a third-rate free weekly newspaper which depends on small advertisers for revenue. Competition with Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian provides terrible value to advertisers. They charge a large fee, run your ad only once per week, and on the same page with incoherent political screeds, strange editorials, factually incorrect news pieces, and artistic criticism of the latest pornographic dvds.

      Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian is a bad product. And for the Guardian, Craigslist *is* local competition, and they *do* employ San Francisco workers (4, I think).

      • This is excessively critical of the Bay Guardian - probably because the poster is a Republican idiot. He's relying on the probability that a lot of /. readers aren't local and don't read it.

        While the Guardian is definitely "left" or "progressive" or whatever bozo political term you prefer, the fact of the matter is the Guardian has been around a hell of a lot longer than Craigslist and has far better content.

        While I thought the criticism in the article was a bit heavy-handed on Craig, this current issue of
        • Ah I see, Craig Newmark is only in it for the money, but Bruce Brugmann just wants to save puppies and help old ladies across the street? Please! Brugmann has lost his mind and the content of the Guardian has decline with him. I think it's swell that Brugmann fought for public power for 30 years (and lost), but you can't point to political fights as evidence that your newspaper is of any use.

          As for the rest of your post, shove it up your ass with a hydraulic ram, you fucking fascist cocksocket.
          • i don't know anything about fascist cocksockets, but the rest of what he says is pretty much true. additionally, with the recent redesign the paper has become harder to read (smaller typefaces and some kind of freaky chopped-block layout scheme) while making more room for more ads. i've liked the guardian for a long time but over the past few years it has really become untenable.
            • I agree, the new Guardian layout sucks.

              Not relevant to the point, however, which was about Craigslist, not the Guardian. Shooting the messenger is not relevant.

              I only read the thing during my laundry, anyway, and then mostly to find out what's going on in town and what movies are playing. Occasionally they do publish an interesting main article as well. OTOH, I only use Craiglist for posting ads for my tech support service and occasionally browsing the computer gigs, job ads, and things for sale. This is ha
          • I said nothing about the motivations of the Guardian owners. It isn't even relevant to the point.

            The point was that the OP didn't like the Guardian criticizing Craigslist because the Guardian was a leftist rag (in his - and perhaps many people's - opinion), thus ignoring the point of the Guardian article that Craig's stated purpose for building Craigslist was "community building", which doesn't seem to have been all that successful outside of the Bay Area and seems to have taken a backseat to the revenue.

            Al

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @10:37PM (#14644062)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "He calls Craigslist the Walmart of classified ads because it siphons money out of the local economy since Craigslist doesn't employ people locally in the markets in which it operates." -- Are you fucking kidding? Craigslist is fair competition -- if you can offer a product for cheaper and better, then you get the business. It's called efficiency, it's the key to economic growth, and this stupid logic of preserving outdated jobs is killing American productivity. Not only that, walmart is a product of the g
      • Keep in mind that economic growth does not automatically equal lower and middle class growth. It is possible for economic growth to benefit the rich while harming the middle and lower classes. IE, the new wealth goes to the rich, and the not-rich either stay the same, or lose wealth.
      • If you read the Guardian article, he recognizes that Craigslist is a marvel of capitalism. He says several times that while he isn't happy with that, it's definitely a legitimate way to go, and the local papers could have done this themselves at any time in the last few years. They screwed up, and Craig got the business.

        That said, his main problem is that Craig's notion of "community building" while riding on the backs of classified ads is mostly bullshit.

        It's hard to argue against his point.
    • Isn't technology terrible? Doing with a few programmers what previously employed thousands of people. Someone should stop this!! What about the children of those poor out-of-work newspaper employees? Won't someone think of the children? WEB SITES MUST BE STOPPED!!!

  • the real reason (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    when they say it's not about the money, it's always about the money

    the real question i suppose is why so many feel such a need for greed

  • Limits (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pjh3000 ( 583652 ) * on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:18PM (#14643495)
    Perhaps one solution would be to allow one post per category per day. Anything extra would cost you.
    • Yeah, I like that idea too. Let people post the first one free, which lets the casual user avoid fees. The realestate agents / brokers who post day in and day out (and are the one's abusing the system with same-day repeats to keep on top of the stack) will have a market force applied to curb the posting.

      For things like home, or rent listings you could even limit it to once per week. I mean how often do you need to update those? And for that category, you could also require a (not publicaly disclosed) a

    • Re:Limits (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mabu ( 178417 )
      I run several popular classified engines for various clients. You don't have to limit postings. You can easily create a blacklist that stops most of the abusers. Most of them are repeat offenders continually adding the same ads over and over. A keyword-based blacklist would stop at least 90% of this, and you use an IP-based blacklist for the rest, and then you deal with just a tiny amount of random spam that can be addressed by the user-reporting system.

      Another solution is to "deputize" more moderators
    • Perhaps one solution would be to allow one post per category per day. Anything extra would cost you.

      I actually had the exact same idea at first, but the implementation would be a bitch, if not impossible to do fairly. How would you identify who each poster is? Generating a ton of email addresses isn't tough. IP address might work, but between proxies and rich companies/people with large IP blocks, you could still get significant abuse. While it may hurt those with more resources some, it would hurt the casu

      • Use a valid credit card for the free posting, identify an account by a credit card. Bill subsequent postings (with authorization) to the card.

  • Craigslist = spam/scam heavy and search is lacking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tokengeekgrrl ( 105602 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:24PM (#14643515)
    There are so many scams and spam postings on craigslist now that I turn to my network of friends and an internal posting board at my work before bothering to use it.

    Don't get me wrong, I love craigslist and used it back when it was just a list-serv. But success has its price and that price is a ton of clutter.

    If craigslist had decent search capabilities that would help mitigate the problem but as it is, it's very frustrating. You can't search for anything in multiple neighborhoods in the same city, let alone search for something in multiple cities. Searching for housing is tedious since you can't filter it by number of bedrooms, bathrooms, whether it has off-street parking, etc.

    I have found some utilities online that will do craigslist filtering but they can't help but miss a bunch of postings since they're just parsing a bunch of text. There is nothing that they can key off of in order to filter accurately.

    I'll still use craigslist when I need to, of course, but I also use other things as well and don't solely rely on it.

    - tokengeekgrrl
    • The spam and scam postings are easily dealt with if they ramped their filter/reporting system up a few notches. Why they don't is beyond me and that's mainly why there are problems. This is a classic case of them having a technological solution to the problem and choosing a different approach, or letting the problem fester as a means of justifying changing the business model.
    • People bitch about craigslist, but in truth it's an awesome display of market-clearing power. In the last two months, I have:

      Sold my car on Craigslist, for more than car dealers offered, in cash, in under 4 hours.

      Sold a Playstation 2 in under a day.

      Sold all the major parts of a broken iBook, including the broken logic board, for more than the total offered by a computer salvage company.

      Bought a 6-year-old laptop computer with the exact specifications I wanted, in under two days, for less than the median se
  • craig, AK Population (1990): 1260 (504 housing units)
    craig, CO Population (1990): 8091 (3559 housing units)
    craig, IA Population (1990): 116 (47 housing units)
    craig, MO Population (1990): 346 (166 housing units)
    craig, NE Population (1990): 228 (116 housing units)

    (from dictionary.reference.com)

    Anyway, so they'll charge. But $10 won't stop annoying/deceptive ads and if they go much higher, they'd better offer something for it, like better searching and better policing. How much does Ebay spend to fight fr
  • Days of free Craigslist listings coming to a close
    Craigslist has been charging for job posts for a while. It is true that it has not charged for realestate listings before, but it is not a new thing for them to charge for ANY listing.
  • I wonder when the dating / personals section will become a "profit centre" for the likes of Craigslist and the Gumtree.
  • I'll be darned if I can find the /. article, though. here's one blog post [typepad.com] that mentioned it...

  • The fee is for brokers only... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It should be noted the fee is for brokers (a who charge the tenant a hefty fee-- usually one month's rent or more-- to act as a go between between landlord and tenant), not for "no fee" landlords, roommates-wanted ads, shares or sublets.

  • their plan all along (Score:5, Insightful)

    by opencity ( 582224 ) on Saturday February 04, 2006 @07:56PM (#14643633) Homepage
    Like the text ads and adsense on Google I would assume this was Craig's plan all along. Newspaper classifieds are going the way of the horse and buggy anyway. As soon as the routing, billing and favored content issues are sorted out we'll start to see the end of free email. A penny a message eliminates spam but doesn't slow me down.

    OT somewhat: To me, the internet has so far destroyed more 'wealth' than it created. What was once the music business is losing the 'business' part (probably going to improve the music). Corporations that were worth $ because of song ownership / publishing catalogs are now involved in a market driven con game to claim they're still worth anything at all. Magazines that used to employ writers, designers, editors, mail room clerks are watching their industry go away, and some covering their own demise. The writers end up blogging where Googles current ad-revenue illusion can make them a couple of $$ a day. When the fraudulent aspect of click throughs becomes more evident, that revenue stream will ride off into the sunset.

  • How newspapers can fight back (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gregwbrooks ( 512319 ) * <gregb@@@west-third...net> on Saturday February 04, 2006 @08:54PM (#14643782)
    Craigslist is a bitter pill for newspapers - most metro dailies make a third of their advertising revenue from classifieds. McKinsey (insert genuflect here) has a new analysis piece on how papers can fight back. [mckinseyquarterly.com] Relevant reading for anyone who follows the industry.

  • in my experience here in boston, realtors who are aware of craigslist will post properties on there and use that as a way to direct clients who like apartment X that they saw on craingslist, when in fact that property (at least here in the insane boston housing market) is probably already gone. one realtor seemed to be getting the vast majority of his clients through craigslist postings that had very little to do with the apartments he was going to show the clients.
  • ...they don't start charging for the casual encounters section. Where else am I gonna find a transexual love monkey who is turned on my the thought of a 3sum with its girlfriend?
  • Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist [craigslist.org], was interviewed by Tavis Smiley [pbs.org] of PBS station KCET in Los Angeles in January. One of the things he spoke of was spending much of his time with customer service. In particular he mentioned problems with New York City housing advertisers doing bait and switch. Perhaps charging for housing ads will also help fund dealing with these problems.
    • Text of PBS KCET Tavis Smiley Interview with Craig Newmark:

      Tavis: Up next on this program, the creator of Craig's List, Craig Newmark. Stay with us.

      Tavis: Ten years ago, Craig Newmark started a small Website designed to help his friends and colleagues share information about things like jobs and apartments and events. He just happened to call the site Craig's List. Today, as you well know, (laugh) Craig's List is in 34 countries around the globe, used by some 10 million users a month. Craig Newmark, nice to
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Isn't it amazing how we humans continue to ruin everything worthwhile!
  • The fees have been proposed as a way to combat the problem of people posting the same thing several times a day to keep their listing near the top of the list.

    Hmmm, wouldn't you also be making money off of it?

    Oh... we didn't think of that...

    -

  • re: brokers suck. (Score:2, Informative)

    by bluehalo ( 187789 )
    It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent). I had a friend who was hired part time to work for a broker in the summer (via a job posting on craigslist) and her job was to simply create listi

    • It's the brokers who ruined it for everyone and it is such a good thing that craigslist finally implemented this fee. You can avoid the brokers in other boroughs, even Brooklyn most of the time, but the way it works in Manhattan is that you HAVE to go through a broker to find a place and you always end up paying them a hefty fee (usually at least a month's rent).

      There is one and only one reason for the littany of nonsense you've catalogued in your post: RENT CONTROL. [You could throw in Rent Control's ba

  • Craigslist should charge a buck for anything and donate the money.
    It would cut down on the spam and it would raise money for a good cause.
    I like Craig, but Craig is not the good cause I'm thinking of.
  • I saw the repost-a-day when I was searching for housing on Craigslist. I found it very annoying, and made up my mind that I wouldn't use services from that poster, even if it was useful (and it wasn't.)

    This got me thinking, though- why not just charge someone to auto-bump? "Pay us $5, and for the the length of your posting, we will automatically bump you to the top at the beginning of each day." It removes the repeats, takes care of those who are the problem, and everyone else goes on having free postings t
  • After the announcement that AOL and Yahoo are going to start charging a fee to send email in to their servers this announcement irks me. . Shees

    We get nickle and dimed to death. And instead of putting in place real solutions like requiring SMTP authorization, we get to pay and pay and pay.

    Then of course there are the fees tacked on to monthly phone bills. Fortunately this one doesn't bother me as much because I jumped to VoIP over a year ago. But already I'm hearing the drum beat of more taxes and fee

  • I think $10 is a bit too high, especially for apartment management agencies that often have many apartments come available each month. Maybe $1 per listing would be better. I guess they need to find the sweet-spot where the price doesn't drive away listings altogether, but keeps down the repeats.

    I've never needed to look for an apartment on Craigslist anyway, so I don't know how this issue might be handled. It would be nice to be sure a listing goes away when the unit is rented. But you can't really b

  • http://forums.newyork.craigslist.org/?forumID=2004 0204 [craigslist.org]

    It's amazing how involved (and accessible) Craig is!

  • This Is How You Fix Bad Site Design (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @05:28AM (#14645083) Homepage
    Charge for your mistakes.

    The problem with Craigslist, as everyone who posts there knows, is that your post rolls off the front page in a matter of a few hours, but you are supposed to only post once every seven days (not that anyone does this - everyone posts at least daily and many post multiple times a day.) You're also only supposed to post in your immediate neighborhood. Right - like the people within five or ten blocks of you are going to be enough to support your business - especially in a town like San Francisco where a "neighborhood" is barely ten blocks, if that.

    As everyone knows, very few people look beyond the first page or two of Google search results, and very few people look beyond the first page or two of Craigslist search results.

    The only calls I've ever gotten from my ads - and that has been a grand total of TWO - were within an hour of being posted while they were still on the first page. The rest of the time, my ads are completely worthless. This is the dirty little secret of Craigslist.

    So now they intend to charge for the dubious privilege of getting somebody to read your ad. Fat chance. This will be the end of Craigslist. Numerous people offering tech support services will no longer advertise simply because the return on the ad investment will be too small to justify paying for the ad. It's that simple. In the end, of the couple hundred tech support people advertising on Craigslist now, maybe a couple dozen will remain.

    Then the service ads page will be only one page and maybe it will work. Apparently the only way to generate any business is to be the only company able to afford to run an ad...

    Somehow I don't think this is what Craigslist was intended to be.

    It's also interesting that I read today in one of the SF weekly papers a criticism that Craig, despite his rhetoric about "building communities", basically has done nothing to do that in the over 100 cities his operation is in. Instead, Craigslist has basically wiped out the classified ad sections of newspapers in every community it operates in. While this is not a bad thing per se, the end result, as the paper points out, is that none of the revenue remains in the community. When asked about this, Craig's only response was "I only go where people want me."

    Craigslist has now made up my mind for me. It's worthless advertising there for the PC tech support business at least. Besides the saturation advertising of the two or three hundred people doing this work in the city, and the multiple posts, now they want to charge.

    Forget it. I'll do it the hard way - promote my Web site and resort to direct mail.
    • Your post seems to be a bit confused to me. First you say that craigslist is worthless because of all the spamming, then you say that charging to cut down on the spamming is wrong - even while you admit that the charging may help:

      "Then the service ads page will be only one page and maybe it will work. Apparently the only way to generate any business is to be the only company able to afford to run an ad."

      Um, we're talking about $10 here. If you can't afford that, maybe you are in the wrong business. Also, I
      • You're confused, but perhaps I wasn't completely clear.

        Criagslist is obviously intending to charge for more types of ads than they're doing now.

        Their stated goal is to reduce the redundant posting of ads.

        This occurs in the computer services section, which is the only section I'm concerned about.

        The problem is the entire setup. People post multiple times because the setup forces your ad off the front page within hours, while at the same time you're not supposed to post multiple times or actually more than on

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