How does craigslist

Close to million people visit its website every month. Craigslist is an online classifieds website. Users can browse listings in various commercial categories, including:. Apart from its commercial offerings, users can also engage in the various discussion forums that are live on the website. Craigslist is segregated by geography, meaning each city, state, and country Craigslist is available in over countries across the globe can access their own version of the platform.

To this date, Craigslist has stayed true to the initial design that it launched with in the mids. A self-proclaimed nerd, Newmark spent the first 18 years of his career at IBM where he assisted other clients as a technical support engineer. After tenures in Detroit and Pittsburgh, Newmark decided to spice things up and move out west. In , he joined Charles Schwab and subsequently moved to San Francisco.

When he arrived in San Francisco, Newmark started emerging himself in local programming events and get-togethers. To keep himself and his friends up to date, he started an email list that would notify everyone about the events that would take place. That email list became a fun side project of his but after a while took on a life of its own.

Eventually, people started posting other content such as the furniture they would sell. People even started buying cars from each other off of that list. To streamline the content, Newmark decided to put up a simple website that would list all the offerings. Newmark registered Craigslist as a. But soon after, the website was started being used more and more for commercial purposes.

One of those frequent users became Christina Murphy, a tech recruiter out of San Francisco. She had frequent calls with Newmark as a result of frequently screwing up her job postings. Murphy, along with an IT consultant called Nancy Melone, began discussing a more professional foundation of Craigslist. For over a year, the site was available under 2 domains, namely craigslist.

Unfortunately, tensions between Melone and Newmark quickly started to emerge. Newmark, on the other hand, wanted for things such as the price for an ad to remain as is. These tensions led to an inevitable split. On a faithful day in September , users who tried accessing the List Foundation domain would be automatically redirected to a for-profit website called MetroVox. Blindsided by the move, Newmark quickly urged his users to not visit the List Foundation domain anymore.

Due to the years-long relationship he had built up, they followed his command. A few months later, the bubble burst, and MetroVox was shut down. To avoid a similar incident, Newmark decided to run Craigslist as a for-profit organization. Furthermore, acknowledging that he lagged the managerial skills to run a larger organization, he subsequently handed over the reins to Jim Buckmaster. In , Buckmaster dropped out of medical school at the University of Michigan but continued to hang around campus to study classics and doing data entry work.

The company though started as an email distribution list in , made the most out of word of mouth marketing and has currently positioned itself as a synonym to online classified.

But before we get on to answer how Craigslist makes money, let us first understand the business model of Craigslist and how does it work. Craigslist is a region-specific online classified website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, services, community, gigs, resumes, discussion forums and more.

Most of the advertisements on Craigslist are free to post however they do charge for some advertisements depending on the region and the type of the classified. Craigslist, just like other classifieds platforms, operates by listing advertisements in sections relevant to the users. Advertisements are listed based on region and category to avoid confusion and to be relevant for everyone.

In recent years, classified adverts have evolved into a whole new domain. They are no more a newspaper specific advertisements. Advertisements on craigslist have a longer life, are location specific and searchable, and can be accessed by people all over the world in just a few clicks. Well, this company with the peace symbol as their logo has a perfect revenue model which was included in its business strategy accidentally. With a list of subscribers with that type of magnitude should be able to generate revenues that exceed beyond company expense.

The following article provides an overview of Craigslist revenue model, and the specifications of how does Craigslist makes money. Think about Airbnb that works on similar peer to peer model.

This means that anyone on the platform can view advertisements in any of the district zones, region, state, or countries. Customer and community interactions help to create potential channels that increase traffic flow to the Craigslist website. The considerable amount of exposure through active channeling communities, accounts, and rare-users help build new potential signups, account activation conversions, and increase the platforms usage popularity and consideration.

This system has been put in place to help avoid users from any misguiding promises or possible fraudulent activities that may be a potential threat to an honest user. In competition with new age mobile-based platforms like OfferUp and letgo , Craigslist developers introduced C- Plus application ideally for smartphones and tablets for those individuals that happen to use the platform very frequently.

C- plus is a 3 rd party mobile app gateway to the original craigslist website. The application program has been designed for users to browse, search, and make posting on Craigslist, smoothly, effectively, and for free. The C-Plus alone helps to initiate and deploy daily activities that include postings from relative and active users within a specific area or distance.

The application is accessible once downloaded through an app store.