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"Craigslist" costing Newspapers millions

Tue, 12/28/2004 - 09:45 — charlie.collins

The online marketplace/community site that is free to users called "Craigslist" is having a huge impact on businesess that sell the same services.

I have never used the list personally but one of the penguineers here uses it quite frequently and tells me about whats available there from time to time.

Apparently its a huge online classified ad repository which hosts all the ads for free. [UPDATE] The site does not have any advertising but operates on a "community" oriented "free" basis (except for job postings). (And note that eBay now owns 25% of the place, hmmmm, how much longer will it be free? Maybe time for Greggslist?)

See the linked news.com article for more.   Report: Craigslist costing newspapers millions

Comments

Tue, 12/28/2004 - 13:05 — Craig Newmark (not verified)

RE: "Craigslist" costing Newspapers millions

well, don't take advertising, our community said to just charge people for postings for which they'd be paying more money for less effective ads.

ebay is a minority shareholder, no changes along those lines.

fyi... we're running around 70 servers running suse, and switching to Linux desktops. I should be getting Xandros tomorrow, since I've forgotten most of what I knew as sysadmin.

Craig

Tue, 12/28/2004 - 13:36 — atrox (not verified)

RE: "Craigslist" costing Newspapers millions

Wow, good stuff. I thought the site was ad sponsored by what I got from the article on news.com. Guess its not!

Reading the About Us on the site says "No Ads".

I will amend the article here.

The deal with eBay is the thing that really interested me though. What motive does eBay have in providing cash to a non profit oriented site ("except for job postings?)? My only guess is that due to the popularity of the site eBay took an interest and offered to infuse cash in order to have some sort of a voice in how things are run?

Thats not a problem in and of itself in my opinion but it seems like an affront to the "community" is possible when a big corporate player owns some of the site (says the guy using Fedora and programming in Java all day ;)).

Anyway, its a great site and it wasnt my intention to knock it, just to draw attention to the popularity and the impact.

Nice work with SuSE there too, and Linux desktops! Thats great. Another Linux success story perhaps?

Fri, 09/12/2008 - 05:56 — rabcircuit

Its normal, people can

Its normal, people can advertise for free in craigslist, and if they choose a newspaper less people will read it and they have to pay.

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