Yet another Craigslist success tale

By Steve Outing on Jun 30, 2006 in Advertising

This week I posted an ad on the Denver Craigslist looking for some part-time contract marketing help. I must say, I’m impressed with the response I received — 21 so far, which I’ve whittled down to seven candidates that look very promising. The bulk of the responses came in within 24 hours, with a few stragglers within two days.

I was quoted by a reporter recently, on a story about Craigslist’s expansion, as saying, “Newspaper classifieds are dead to me” personally. When I need something, it’s now typical that Craigslist meets my needs well; I don’t need to explore other alternatives like (paid) newspaper advertising. That Craigslist ads are free is a bonus, but I’d gladly pay Craigslist a reasonable fee because I know I’ll get a good outcome from placing an ad on the Denver site. (The prospect of Craigslist charging for anything but a tiny number of categories is extremely remote.)

Anyway, the point is that Craigslist works well, and continues to work well. I often hear from naysayers that because the site is free, categories get so overrun with junk that the site doesn’t have the quality of newspaper classifieds. Sorry, but I don’t see evidence of a problem yet — and the Denver site is very busy and popular.

An amusing aside: Reading through resumes is sometimes good for a chuckle. There was the applicant who got so detailed in the Education section that she described her graduation — from elementary school.

1 Comment(s)

  1. On Jul 1, 2006, Scott AllenNo Gravatar said:

    Steve:

    I’m always glad to hear of success stories like this from craigslist and other online communities that are socially/self-regulated.

    Normally, I work more on long-term relationship-building online, i.e., through blogging, social networking, etc., but at the moment, I’m doing a survey about “transactional trust”, i.e., the creation and determination of trust for the scope of a single transaction, i.e., hiring or buying/selling through craigslist and similar sites.

    I’d greatly appreciate it if you and any of your readers would consider taking the survey. There are a couple of nice thank-you gifts for your time and you can optionally receive a copy of the survey results. Check out my blog post about the survey for more info.

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