I don’t know how I missed this news, but Chad let me know that as of April 15th Craigslist will charge $5 per automotive listing. The listing expires after thirty days, but the seller can repost the exact ad another thirty days (into perpetuity?) for free.
Am I fan of this change? Nope. Craigslist will simply push people to other websites, most likely and primarily Facebook. And that’s a problem for me, as Facebook’s search engine absolutely sucks. It will probably also mean that vehicles that are non-running will more often appear under automotive parts, which remains free.
I actually think $5 is a fair/nominal price, but totally agree it will (unfortunately) push people to Let Go, FaceBook, and probably others. EBay already gets money on the back end, so I don’t think sellers will turn there more often.
Should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Reposting is another $5 for an additional 30 days. I’m guessing the repost starts the new $5 time period which would mean to get your money’s worth for the previous ad you would need to repost just before the ad expires. Try to remember to do that on schedule after 30 days. There are still a lot of people that don’t have facebook which limits access to the ads there. Have we gotten spoiled? What if we just went back to the ‘Nickle Ads’?
Have we gotten spoiled? Absolutely. For two decades we’ve enjoyed a free service. Now, it’s going to cost money, however trivial the amount is. FB is not a good alternative, for the reasons cited.
I doubt the monetization is related to a need for cash flow; it seems more like an effort to stem misuse of the system. Perhaps this will only be temporary? I guess we’ll see.
Maybe it will keep all the dealers of that place 20 ads at a time, even under private sellet
Yeah, while I love free, I wonder if this is more of a “co-pay” to separate the wheat from the chaff.
So craigslist helped kill local newspapers and now they want money? Shocking! Facebook is full of misleading ads, or ads with the price listed as the monthly payment, or stuff listed wrong. Not sure how you’re =going to deal with this issue Dave.