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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."
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.
You can do all this on these "vertical" search engines:
For jobs, indeed.com
For real estate, trulia.com
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.
Still, money's usually enough of a deterrent to stop the majority of the abuse.
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
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 have you on the program.
Craig Newmark: Hey, it's my pleasure.
Tavis: It's a pleasure to meet you. So, I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times, but not by me. So you could not have had any idea, when you came up with this idea for your friends and coworkers, that Craig's List would be, like, all the rage.
Newmark: You're giving the wrong guy credit. I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.
Tavis: Tell me, you're very modest and I respect that, but tell me how the idea started, though. So you're in your apartment one day, or?
Newmark: (laugh) Well, in '94, I was at Charles Schwab, the discount brokerage? And I was evangelizing the Net there, you know, to use in the business. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, I thought I should do some of that. So in early '95, I started emailing a few friends.
Tavis: And?
Newmark: They suggested more stuff. I did it. They suggested more. When they told me I had to give it a name, they said hey, we already call it Craig's List. And they were right. And that's been pretty good, since when things go wrong, which is not often, but when they go wrong, I take it personally.
Tavis: I would assume you would, given that your name is on it. I wanted to ask you, so I will, I guess, how it feels to have started something. It's one thing to have eBay, which I wanna get to in a second, 'cause they're now your partner in this project. But eBay or Amazon or Google. But yours bears your name. So is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Newmark: It's a mixed blessing. I'm proud of what's happened. But when there's any kind of problem, not often, 'cause we have a really good culture of trust. But I take it all seriously. That's why I do full time customer service. I was doing it minutes ago; I'll be doing it minutes into the future.
Tavis: So when you say customer service, what does Craig do every day?
Newmark: (laugh) I handle specialized cases. Things like moderating our discussion boards. Lightly, very lightly. And also dealing with apartment brokers in New York. That's my biggest project. Because in that market, they've controlled, you know, apartments and rentals too long, and they haven't been very kind. That's changing.
Tavis: Yeah, speaking of apartment rentals, if I got my numbers right here, $20 million, is it $20 million a month that you guys make just off the apartment listings here?
Newmark: That's one estimate for the whole site over the course of a year. And frankly, first I don't know the answer. And secondly, I don't care. Jim Buckmaster cares. He's the guy who really runs things now. He's my CEO. My focus is just on getting customer service done every day. We've left behind a lot of money on the table, we continue to do so. How much does a guy need to earn?
Tavis: Yeah. Why does money not matter to you? You got something that's big, and yet you seem like you don't care whether you make money or not.
Newmark: Well, it does matter. I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, 'cause I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And (laugh) you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like program
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.
It's amazing how involved (and accessible) Craig is!
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.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.