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."

Comments

good

[joe 155]

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.

Re:good

[IANAAC]

Hopefully the money will be put back into the programming of the site. The abusive behaviour could easily be handled with the right programming.

Still, money's usually enough of a deterrent to stop the majority of the abuse.

craigSlist

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[licamell]

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

[Kadin2048]

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.

So we're on the internet, right

[karmaflux]

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.

Meta-Moderation?

[bigwang]

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?

[fupeg]

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?

[MustardMan]

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.

It was bound to happen

[Laura_DilDio]

after all, doesn't ebay have a stake in Craigslist?

Craigslist has become Spam Central

[Animats]

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.

Expanded Search

[BrookHarty]

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:The submitter is an idiot

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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

ScuttleMonkey: Are you saying I can dodge spell checks?

* *B-B: No ScuttleMonkey. I'm saying when the time comes, you won't have to.

Editors?

[Catskul]

Can we charge Slashdot editors to post stories... It might have the same benefitial effects !

i hear a sucking sound...

[d723]

Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian has an interesting perspective 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.

Re:i hear a sucking sound...

[Jeffrey Baker]

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).

Limits

[pjh3000]

Perhaps one solution would be to allow one post per category per day. Anything extra would cost you.

Craigslist = spam/scam heavy and search is lacking

[tokengeekgrrl]

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

their plan all along

[opencity]

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.

Try combining your two statements

[Gorimek]

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.

Customers aren't property.

[jcr]

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