|
Craigslist basic information and historyIt was in 1995 when Craig Newmark founded the now known Craigslist.org. It served the San Francisco Bay Area but it expanded to 9 more cities in the United States by 2000 and now it currently caters over 450 cities in 50 countries.With Craigslist, you can post your job ads for free depending on which cities you are in but if you are in San Francisco Bay Area, you pay $75 per ad and $25 for New York, Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon, $10 for New York paid broker apartment listings. Craigslist's popularity is phenomenal. With just a very simple website, no one had suspected it will grow as big as it is now. Its simplicity combined with its practicality made it popular to a lot of posters and seekers. You could find just about any type of ad in Craigslist. It's like having an online classified ad that has anything and everything under the sun. If you are on a job hunt, you could start your search by browsing through the different available jobs in your city posted in Craigs list. There are a lot of For Sale ads, as well as housing, community and a lot more. You could find several discussion forums as well where you could talk about anything as long as you don't violate Craigslist's terms of service. You could flag inappropriate postings there and you could help keep the Craigslist forum free of inappropriate posts. A website such as craigslist.com became a very useful tool to sellers. The World Wide Web had proven itself and because of its worldwide capabilities, sellers posting ads on an online classified ad site can get more viewers and therefore, more potential customers. Potential buyers also swarm sites such as craigslist as they could find a great variety of items or properties being sold and you could have, in just a few clicks, a comparison of the best prices offered for these items or products. Job hunters are also frequently checking out the posts in craigslist.com hoping to find the right available jobs for them. With many job postings in Craigslist, there is a lot of successful employment with the site's help of paving the way for employers to find the right and decent potential employees. Currently, Craigslist only have 25 employees and amazingly, it handled its website quite well although there are several times when craigslist encounters problems and legal charges for some of the postings found in Craigslist.com. In 2006, Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued craigslist for allowing its posters to post housing ads that have violated the Fair Housing Act of Chicago. Later that year, Craigslist was again reported for the fraudulent ads posted in their Casual Encounters forum where posters post personal information in reply to these ads and they end up sending important personal information online publicly such as their contact numbers, email addresses, and even home addresses. Prostitution was even possible through craigslist and in September of 2007 a woman had pled guilty for prostituting underage girls by posting on Craigslist. In February of 2008 a woman in Michigan posted an ad searching for a hitman to kill her romantic rival. In April of 2008, an ad caught the eyes of many Craigs list viewers when a couple placed an ad inviting everyone nearby Oregon to go and take anything they wish from the house of a man they had burglarized. This was their attempt to cover up their crime. There are many more incidents like this that occurred but it's really unavoidable. With only 25 employees and hundreds over thousands of new ads posted everyday, they gave the readers and posters the privilege and responsibility of flagging inappropriate ads. This made the users gain more control over Craigslist and this helps the staff minimize the problem of bad posts and posts under inappropriate categories as well. Currently, craigslist.com gets over nine billion views per month and it gets the 9th place for U.S.-based websites with over 30,000,000 unique visitors a month. Craigslist receives millions of advertisements a month and over two million job listings a month that made it the world's leading classified service. You could find advertisements here for buy and sell advertisements, personal advertisements where you could find categories such as women seeking men, men seeking women, men seeking men, women seeking women and other erotic services just to name a few. Currently, Craigslist have three board members and they are Craig Newmark, Jim Buckmaster and eBay who owns 25% of the stake. It is believed that the revenue of Craigslist in 2007 reached an amazing $150,000,000! It was in 2004 when it was announce that eBay Inc. acquired 25% worth of shares of Craigslist. There were lots of Internet companies who were vying to get shares of Craigslist but only eBay was allowed to invest on craigslist. A former Craigslist executive sold his shares by approaching different companies and it was eBay who was able to buy his shares. There were some speculations about eBay's connection with Craigslist and some users of Craigslist feared that they no longer would get the same quality of service for free or at a small price but eBay executives made it clear that they won't alter anything and they would let Newmark and Buckmaster to have the full autonomy of the site. There are many potential investors who are interested to have a share with Craigslist. The online classified market had been very remarkable and there are great potentials for these sites in the future. There are now several other websites who are trying to follow the footsteps of Craigslist and are doing pretty well too. Craigslist has opened the door to online classified ads and with the increase of sites offering the same kind of service, more people gets to benefit more. As remarkable as the rise of some of these sites, none can compare to the success received by Craigslist. |