Craigslist : Improving Matching Efficiency For Small Business

1. Craigslist.org: Improving Matching Efficiency For Small Business Craigslist is a network of online local communities, featuring free classified advertisements and forums sorted by various topics -jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, resumes, and discussion forums. Founded by Craig Newmarkin 1995, it currently serves over 20 billion page views per month and is the 11th most popular website in the United States. It began the service as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in San Francisco, before becoming a web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000; by 2013, over 700 "cities" in 70 countries have Craigslist sites…

2. Although it is not a non-profit, Craigslist has always prided itself on providing a “relatively” non-commercial environment for buyers and sellers and has frequently emphasized that its primary focus is not the generation of more revenue.24 Hours on Craigslist is a 2005 American feature-length documentary film by Michael Gibson that captures the people and stories behind a single day's posts.

3. It’s a combination of a newspaper classified sections (including sections for sales, products and services), combined with an editorial page, and a job seekers website all offered online for easy access, at virtually no cost to the user. The online search on Craigslist has crowded out traditional print search. Forbes called it in 2007 the “Newspaper Killer”

4. Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit, instead it prefers to help users find cars, apartments, jobs, and dates. Craigslist's main source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities.The site is notable for having undergone only minor design changes since its inception; even by 1996 standards, the design is very simple. Since 2001, the site design has remained virtually unchanged and uses only minimal JavaScript, a design philosophy common in the late 1990s but almost unheard of today for a major website. CRAIGSLIST

5. Craig Newmark with current CEO Jim Buckmaster --Newmark, says that Craigslist works because it gives people a voice, a sense of community trust and even intimacy. --Other factors he cites are consistency of down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity. --Newmarkwas approached with an offer for running banner ads on Craigslist, but he decided to decline.

6. But still, it was criticized for moving into local communities and "threatening to eviscerate" local alternative newspapers. Craigslist has been compared toWalmart.

7. In spite of its anti-commercial stance, Craigslist contains the rubrics for independent contractors and small-business owners. 1. All you have to do is to post an ad in the appropriate category under the FOR SALE or SERVICES sections of the community. 2. To generate greater profit, the business owner can use discussion forums. Be careful, otherwise the promotional postings will be treated as a spam.

8. There’s a difference between betweenposting information related to your business in a way that is informative to the reader and spamming the boards with useless posts intended solely to promote your business! Spamming is not only likely to be overlooked by readers, but also runs the risk that the Craigslist moderators will delete your posts or take more severe actions against you.

9. What works? It depends on the type of business. For such offline businesses as hair salons, bakeries, check cashing stores, insurance agencies, jewelry stores, used car lots, advertising on Craigslist works reasonably well , especially for generating leads.Anything that would work in a newspaper classified section would be the most suitable. An ad with a URL can also help to drive traffic and support SEO goals (especially for local search). Craigslist is best for commodity products and services where you're the low price leader.

10. http://seattle.craigslist.org/Marketing on Craigslist works best for geographically localized products or services. The goal - the advertising products or services in a certain place for a certain amount of time. Anything else, and you will be manipulating the purpose of the site.Craigslist can be a lot of work, since you have to keep putting up new ads as the old ones expire, put them separately in each city you want to list in, keep changing the wording, etc.

11. Advertisements for "adult" services were initially given special treatment, then closed entirely on September 4, 2010, following a controversy over claims by state attorneys general that the advertisements promoted prostitution. The legal threats could have a chilling effect on online expression. According to the lawyers, if you impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users do, then they're not going to take chances. It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression. Craigslist has a user flagging system to quickly identify illegal and inappropriate postings. Users may flag postings they believe to be in violation of Craigslist guidelines. Items are flagged for three categories: miscategorized, prohibited, or spam/overpost.

12. In terms of cooperation with non-profits, already in 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation,nonprofit organization that offers free and low cost events and online resources to promote community building at all levels. It accepts charitable donations, and rather than directly funding organizations, it produces "face-to-face events and offers online resources to help grassroots organizations get off the ground and contribute real value to the community". Since 2004, the Craigslist Foundation has hosted an annual conference called Boot Camp, an in-person event that focuses on skills for connecting, motivating and inspiring greater community involvement and impact. The Craigslist Foundation is also the fiscal sponsor for Our Good Works, the organization that manages AllforGood.org, an application that distributes volunteer opportunities across the web and helps people get involved in their communities.