Porkchop Technology Review's

Craiglist is a free place to advertise and sell used items online locally and its completely free, its also very popular place to buy items and sell items, even more popular than the newspaper. You can visit Craigslist at http://www.craigslist.org

A few months ago I put an ad on Craigslist and the newspaper, Craigslist was free and the newspaper cost around $60 for the weekend, it was costing me for each word, it was a very small pathetic ad with tons of other ones (It took me awhile to find the ad). On Craigslist I included pictures and could write as much as I wanted too and it was all free. I used 2 different numbers for each of the ad’s, I used one number on the newspaper and different number on the Craigslist posting to see the difference of responses between both. After the weekend, I only got 2-3 calls from the newspaper and 30+ calls from Craigslist, this just shows how much people use Craigslist for looking for items than actually the newspaper.

For years and years newspapers have always made a bunch of money from advertising from people, either it be a garage sale ad or an item, now a days you can use sites such as Craigslist to post ad’s for free. This of course is not good for the newspaper company, but much better for the consumer. With the newspaper, and this was the biggest local newspaper in town, people would have to either buy the newspaper to read the ad, were as the Craigslist ad, someone just needed an Internet connection, and computer to read the ad, and there are many places that allow you to use a computer for free, such as in this town, library’s have free Internet access to the public. If you look at a newspaper classified section, you pretty much need a magnifine glass to see those small ads, and only effective ad’s are those ad’s located on the front page, or on the main pages of newspaper content. More and more companies are now realising that advertising online is a lot more profitable as well. For example Google has a program called Adwords, which you pay within your budget to appear on millions of site’s and you pay for each click, but within your budget that you wish to spend, and only authentic clicks are counted. This is what you see on many web site’s that have the Google Adsense ad’s and on the right side of the page on Google search.  It’s actually cheaper to advertise online than in a newspaper and  you reach more people.

I have to say I’ve sold many items on Craigslist and have had a huge success rate using it, but there of course are some problems regarding a site that anyone can post and access for free across the world. Since your location on Craiglist is open to the whole world, this also brings in scams. Many scammers see Craigslist as a great opportunity to get people, some of the most common scams are the overseas buyer who wants to buy the item through a personal check, you end up sending the item to the person and get the check and you cash it and it bounces, and your out that money and don’t have your item anymore, so please do not use Craigslist to do dealings overseas, if someone not locally is contacting you through Craigslist be very careful since its most likely a scam, and just wait because there will be local buyers that will want what you sell and if it doesn’t sell the first time then try again, its free. I also notice that people now who buy from Craigslist take precautions now, for example I sold a laptop on Craigslist once, and the guy wanted to meet in a public place, this is actually great idea, since you never know who you are meeting or going to, this is another great way to be safe but at the same time a little extreme.

Of course this varies from town to town and country but I noticed that Craigslist was a lot better place to advertise and sell things and even buy items, first of all because it was free and secondly the amount of people I got responding to my ad’s, I reached a bigger amount of people than the newspaper, but this varies as I said. I think a lot of newspapers are suffering from this, since one of there main ways of getting money was through the classifieds, newspapers have to re-invent the way ads are displayed and published and make it more worthwhile for someone to buy it, like cheaper prices.  This is another prime example of technology taking over jobs, since Craigslist is all automated and they probably have much fewer staff than the all the newspaper companies combined, where the newspaper company has to have someone to answer the phone for classifieds and someone to type them out at least.

I also read online that Craigslist is worth now around $2.4 Billion and its up there with Ebay.
Here is an article of Craig Newmark the owner and creator of Craigslist, interviewed and asked on how he started Craigslist, very interesting read. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/06/no_vision_whats/