Slashdot Mirror
Craigslist to Start Charging for Some Listings
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."
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.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
make sure you do not omit the "s" in craigslist.
otherwise it takes you to a page with porn ads.
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).
The summary links to a Washington Post article with no links in it.
Craigslist can be found at www.craigslist.org.
See? That wasn't so hard.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
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'"
after all, doesn't ebay have a stake in Craigslist?
Anonymous ads without moderation just don't work any more.
It's craigSlist.org. If you try going to craiglist.com you get something else.
How can you spell "Craigslist" wrong three times in an article summary...about Craigslist????
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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...
Can we charge Slashdot editors to post stories... It might have the same benefitial effects !
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian has an interesting perspective on Craigslist:
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.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
Perhaps one solution would be to allow one post per category per day. Anything extra would cost you.
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
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) address to prevent someone from signing up as a 'new' user over and over.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
That site is troll central.
The only reason people even use that hideous site, is because it's free.
There are many ways to combat abusive listings, without having to charge people who post ads.
Charging is just more convenient, and using the 'preventative' excuse is a bunch of BS.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
In a bold new move, Slashdot will charge each poster $10 for each story that has misspellings, misleading titles, inaccurate summaries and finally a double penalty for dupes.
Slashdot has more than a dozen such posters, who select stories for readers throughout the day.
One poster, who chose to remain anonymous, said "This is stupif. It takes several seconds to search for dupes and several seconds more to spelcheck. Can you imagine how long it would take to make sure the story is right?"
Another poster, who goes by the name...
I never understood what the big deal with Craigslist was- I've never seen it, and nothing I've heard about it has really inspired any interest.
Now, if they offered a way to filter out the condos in black neighborhoods...
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 fraud?
And eventually, CraigsList will be just another brand site and we'll find a new cheapo service to use for free.
Fight Spammers!
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 that mentioned it...
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
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.
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.
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.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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 these.....)
Ads for Florida Investments
Ads for Vegas Investments
I place ONE ad a week for my wife's Real Estate Listings there and I would be happy to pay if people did not have to wade through all the garbage just to get to her listing.
The Flag System does not work for Real Estate, Nothing I have EVER flagged has been removed. NOTHING.
And I am ONLY flagging the really spammy crap, not the actual listings.
My time is worth way more than the $10 they will charge.
I like microcars
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. Matter of fact I sold a pair of huge speakers just last night to the second respondant to my ad. He got a good deal, and I got some Jacksons and more room in my apartment. It is good that they are doing something about the New York RE section, it is the worst in the entire world. Between the people that will sell you (ficticious) lists of landlords with no fee apartments to the fake (too good to be true) listings that are real estate agents trying to loop you in to their agency, the section is a far shot from what it used to be. It used to be the only place to find decent no-fee apartments in NYC. unfortunately the real estate industry has corrupted CL long ago just as they did the village voice before that. Thank god they are doing something about it. It is just to easy for the snakes to operate there right now. Buyer beware, as usual.
music lover since 1969
where am I going to find my t4m casual encounter ads now?
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. Relevant reading for anyone who follows the industry.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
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.
I've heard of craigslist off and on for several years now, and while it's big in the bay area and NY and such, I don't live in those places. Even being in one of the main "markets" for it, I don't know *anybody* who actually uses it on any kind of regular basis. And I know lots and lots of people who use the internet for essentially everything.
Never seen the big deal. It's a poorly designed site that has very little going for it. I looked around and can't find anything of interest on there at all. Where's the fire?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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, was interviewed by Tavis Smiley 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.
I've used CL for posting both personals, items for sale, and normal chatty banter in the appropriate sections. The result in all of these cases were the same: replies either on CL or sent to my email were 75% angry bitter people who think that just because its "online" its ok to insult, degrade, ridicule, and generally shit all over anyone the slightest bit different from themselves. And yes, this is a far higher angry bitter person rate than I've seen anywhere else, slashdot included.
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 selling price of the same item on eBay (and of course, no shipping).
I will admit that I get frustrated with the people who call and say they are going to buy the item but then don't, and with the kids who want to buy your Playstation, but don't have any money or transportation and don't even know how to ride the bus, and with the African bank scams that automatically reply to every single listing. But in general it's a fantastic and free method for the buying and selling of anything.
Having just developed and launched my own free job post/search website (http://www.jobopoly.com/ I'm very uncertain about offering a free service, but I just don't feel that a job post is worth $399 (dice/monster) or even $29.99. I plan on charging for resume searches and that's it. Hopefully between that and the few ads I host I'll be able to pay the bills and keep the service up for people to use. Craigslist is no longer a grass-roots operation, it's a BIG operation trying to look grass-roots.
I've used CL for posting both personals, items for sale, and normal chatty banter in the appropriate sections. The result in all of these cases were the same: replies either on CL or sent to my email were less than 25% nice people interested in the ad or wanting to chat, and greater than 75% angry bitter people who think that just because its "online" its ok to insult, degrade, ridicule, and generally shit all over anyone the slightest bit different from themselves. And yes, this is a far higher angry bitter person rate than I've seen anywhere else, slashdot included. Yes I posted this twice. Because I screwed up the first time :P
Craiglist gave a false inflection point signal last January, but I think the new one is accurate.
/ ?entry=craigslist_meme
http://www.realmeme.com:8080/roller/page/realmeme
In the near future, you should see considerably less of Craig in the news, possibly some rising complaints, like we see here at Slashdot.
Apparently not much. Have you ever tried to report fraud to Ebay? It is more frustrating than trying to deal with the DMV or the phone company. Ebay does not care about fraud. They will deny it is their responsibility. Once upon a time Ebay was useful, I don't expect that I will ever bother to use them again. It has turned into the online equivalent of buying car stereos from the back of a van. It's all legal really.
I hope that this also introduces a mechanism to prevent the spammers in the real estate sections. I've been seeing the same goddamned "foreclosure info" posts every single day for as long as I've been looking.
If it's not an actual property for sale, it doesn't belong in the real estate for sale section. That includes everything from the "foreclosure seKrITS!!!!!!", to the "I'll offer sexual favors for a listing" ads from desperate brokers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Why should they?
If you can't compete, too bad. The advertisers are entitled to choose a vendor, and if the Guardian isn't a good deal, they lose. If they'd been a bit smarter about offering their ads on the net sooner than their competitors, they might not be going down the tubes today.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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...
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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 listings on craigslist every day for apartments. All of these apartments were listed on the broker's company website - she would log on to the website and copy the pictures and text directly over to a craigslist ad, sometimes cleaning up the copy a bit but often just posting it as-is. She was paid $100 a week to post 20 ads a day and theoretically would get 10% of the broker fee (the broker would get let's say $3500 and she would get $300) if anyone rented one of the apartments that she listed online, which turned out to be not very often. (ie: never).
After a while she realized that she was posting many of the same apartments multiple times and the broker didn't even care what apartment people called about or what the actual ads said, as long as 20 ads were posted with his contact information on it every day. The people who called about an ad would pretty much never see that actual apartment - the broker would ask what you wanted to pay and then proceed to show you whatever apartments were available that week that were $200-$500 over your price range. After a month or so, my friend quit because the broker was always late to pay the measly $100 per week and the whole operation seemed shady. There were several other people who worked for the same broker just posting ads, so this one broker probably had 100 ads posted per day on craigslist just for him. This guy worked at a company with around 20 other brokers, who probably all had their own minions doing the same thing. Just imagine multiple companies doing the same thing with all their brokers and you realize how useless it is to look for an apartment on craigslist in Manhattan.
I personally have used craigslist to find some great apartments in cities like San Francisco, but in Manhattan it is primarily a form of free advertising that the brokers exploit. The system here is already crappy enough with the brokers, but even more so as long as they are free to render craigslist into a useless spam hole.
Oh, for the love of God. All of the blogs are back now. It was just a damn server problem. I'm sure if you looked around you would have found plenty of mundane blogs that were unavailable. But why miss an opportunity to jump to conclusions and scream "conspiracy!!!" all over the place.
greedy? Hard to say when they're turning away a 1/2 billion in potential revenue Money mag
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.
rigorousintuition "403"s still.
I could get "Cheese Sandwich" and "Windows Mobile" blogs - but about 12-15 poli blogs I frequent were all down...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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 that tend to lack information.
(And, yes, I did find my housing on Craigslist.)
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 fees even for VoIP providers.
Not to mention that I can't get a tax break because in essence I'm single and don't have a mortgage from which I can take interest deductions. Bleah.
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 be sure the person listing it will come back and remove it when it's rented. So, some kind of "yup, this is still available" action would be a good thing, while still a means to keep it from being up high, or even show at all, if I've seen it before. So maybe a $1 placement and $0.05 renewal to keep it active.
What about a pay-for-placement approach? Let them pay whatever they want to pay and the listing shows up with highest payer first. Also provide an option for viewing listings to limit the range of what was paid ... such as few apartments for which no more than $15 nor no less than $0.50 was paid to list.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You got to laugh at their reasoning.
Just say you want to make a few more bucks .
You sold out didn't you.
It's amazing how involved (and accessible) Craig is!
I'm not an apologist or even attempting to defend Ebay, but they have NEVER attempted to deal with fraud. Hell in the early days of Ebay fraud was amazingly high. I got amazing deals back then, but I got defrauded a bit too (the scales tipped in my favor so I call it a win and learned from my losses). For the most part it's up to the end user to make sure they don't get screwed. Read the fucking listing over and over and then read it again, check feedback (if the # is not in the mid triple digits and positive feedback is below 98% don't bother), check that the seller normally sells what your buying (check feedback for other users who have bought "similar" from them and was happy), personally try to buy within neighboring states (I scared a scammer shitless and got my MO back because I had been in the area where he lives and could easily "reach out and touch him"), and when you pay please do make sure you pay the extra $2 for insurance and ask questions before impulsively clicking "buy it now."
Its "buyer beware" and if the buyer can't be bothered to exercise good purchasing etiquette it's their own damn fault when things go to hell.
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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 don't know that craig is charging people to advertise their tech-support business.
"Instead, Craigslist has basically wiped out the classified ad sections of newspapers in every community it operates in."
How has craig done this, if his service is worthless?
I am building a new, better craigslist. MUHAHAHAHA!!
Getting old fast, Shit!
maybe is time for services theadcloud, a free tag-based local classified to take off
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 bastard half-brothers, zoning laws and zoning regulations, but they're all just slightly different incarnations of the same abomination.]
Rent Control artificially restricts the supply of housing, hence endows unnatural potency to the landed gentry and their agents.
I.e. socialism INVARIABLY benefits the Powers-That-Be at the expense of the serfs. Hence its [otherwise inexplicable] popularity with the high-IQ crowd that dominates our universities, non-profits, and "knowledge-based" industries.
That's the way it's always been, and the way it will always be.
and how many links did you shift-click on before you noticed you shouldn't be doing that mmmmm???
Who shift-clicks these days? I control-click or middle-click all my links. Extra tabs are a heck of a lot easier on the desktop than extra windows. You aren't one of those poncey IE users, are you?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
There should have been emoticons or something similar to indicate that I was joking. IRL, I'd have rendered that in a bad hick accent and I probably ought to have done something like that here. *wry grin* The cause of flamewars, that sort of thing is.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.