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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."
after all, doesn't ebay have a stake in Craigslist?
Anonymous ads without moderation just don't work any more.
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...
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.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.
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
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 board; the previous owner had dumped it cheap because she knew it crashed regularly, and even though I spent 30 minutes with the machine before I bought it, I didn't come across the problem. She wouldn't return phonecalls or emails from me the next day.
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. I've seen CL people price stuff ABOVE ebay prices (auctions are not market value, folks!) and found NO END of people trying to take advantage of each other.
Example? Canon 20D's had a rebate for over $100. In one week there were 6-12 listings for them, all at or slightly below the best online prices. Initially they'd mention the UPC codes were removed, but wised up.
Want another example? 750 xbox-360 postings on average right after they came out...with people asking prices anywhere from $750 to $2k. I repeatedly emailed abuse@craigslist.org asking them to just delete ANY ad with "xbox 360" in them, and never even got a reply.
For Craig and other CL people to rant about community this and that, but refuse to shut down those clearly abusing "the community"...is rather hypocritical.
Please help metamoderate.
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 and give them the ability to delete ads, or create a category where spam ads are moved into some "trash" area that is still publicly viewable.
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
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.
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."
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!