Craigslist Expands To 690 Cities - Newspaper Ads Plummet
- 10
- Add a Comment
Craigslist has just expanded its operations by 25% and is now serving 690 cities. The company added mid-sized cities like Susanville, CA, a town with a population of 18,000, to its list of cities being served. A recent news article also states:
If that expansion sounds minor, consider that Craigslist also added new sites for international cities like Lucknow, India (population 2.5 million), Shenzhen, China (14 million), and Newcastle, Australia, (280,000). Most of the sites are in English only. The pages start as virtual ghost towns, eerily devoid of people posting used furniture, apartment vacancies, job openings and Craigslist’s notorious sex ads.
A Craiglist spokeswoman, Susan Mactavish Best, alerted us to the move last night, but offered no additional comment. She said the chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, would add the new cities to the site’s official fact sheet later this month, and that it was conceivable that the company’s founder and “chief customer service representative,” Craig Newmark, did not even know about the change.
Where Craigslist goes, of course, the fortunes of local newspapers often plummet, since classified ads on the site can mostly be placed free.
This is where the newspapers are having problems. How do you compete with a service that is basically free? A service where people can find just about anything in their local area. Will Craigslist kill local newspapers?
Comments welcome.
10 Comments
Ryan Farmer
August 23rd, 2009
at 12:11pm
“Will Craigslist kill local newspapers?”
Is going on to storm the Fox News castle and eat the ogre (Bill O’Reilly), trolls (Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck), and witch (Ann Coulter) too much to ask?
Ron Schenone
August 23rd, 2009
at 12:24pm
Can we cook them first? LOL
canine
August 23rd, 2009
at 1:02pm
Newspapers are getting the slow painful death they deserve.
Goose
August 23rd, 2009
at 4:59pm
Geez…..I used to like Ryan….
Buffet
August 24th, 2009
at 12:07am
It always seemed so petty for the papers to want to charge me for a classifed ad, when they make so much from their advertising, supplemented by their cover price, and, lest we forget, the payoffs and bribes for peddling their biased, sensationalistic, warped propaganda, designed to sway the mindless masses toward complacent, collective thought. Oh yeah, Craig’slist is cool.
Ron Schenone
August 24th, 2009
at 5:02am
Goose - I still like Ryan!
Heh - how is the browser working now? Any problems shutting down?
Buffet - you also forgot to mention that by the time we read their printed news it is already stale.
Buffet
August 24th, 2009
at 7:17am
Stale and rotten sir.
Goose
August 24th, 2009
at 7:29am
I think I like BUFFET better………and no problem with the browser!
PRBristolblog
August 24th, 2009
at 9:49am
If the newspapers truly have the insight to chair community conversations, bring citizen journalists and bloggers into their (monopoloy) sphere then perhaps yes. As good content will always bring eyeballs and the potential of revenue.
As Jeff Jarvis recently said to me reference Twitter and its new goemap API. “There’s nothing stopping news orgs from smart use … except inertia..” http://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/statuses/3447745854
But I think that the newspapers do not understand the technology or have the integrity to compete with Craig’s list etc.
Join in the conversation, share content for free or die guys….
Buffet
August 24th, 2009
at 3:26pm
“There is only one way in the world to be distinguished. Follow your instinct! Be yourself, and you’ll be somebody. Be one more blind follower of the blind, and you will have the oblivion you desire.”
Bliss Carman
1861-1929, Poet