Over the past several years, the website Craigslist has taken the classified world by storm.
It’s like a classified warehouse, with personal ads, realty listings, job ads, and items for sale all on one page.
Part of what makes Craigslist so popular is that it’s free and there’s unlimited space for pictures and long descriptions.
The website is also divided into different communities.
The first surfaced several years ago in San Francisco, the second in Boston, and now they are popping up all over the globe.
To the joy of many, New Hampshire recently acquired its own Craigslist.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens has more on the Craigslist craze.
About six months ago, Craigslist New Hampshire made a quiet debut on the Internet as a tiny link on the website craigslist dot org.
Melissa Urban from Tilton, a long time Craigslist Boston user, was thrilled.
Urban: I mean literally I checked the boards every single day so at some point I realized that New Hampshire had its own boards and when I went on there were probably two or three postings in every category.
Now, the site gets dozens of postings a day.
The website is divided into job announcements, rental listings, items for sale, personals, and a community chat section.
Melissa Urban has used Craigslist to buy a roof rack for her car, find a home for a pet iguana she couldn’t keep, and attract clients for her on-the-side graphic design business.
She says for her, the website has made newspaper advertising a thing of the past.
Urban: You don’t have that interaction you have when you post on Craigslist. I’ve got pictures of my cards, I’ve got a link to my website that the person on impulse can click and be there in two seconds in stead of clipping an add, turning of the computer, linking to the site, or remembering to type it in.
And most importantly, Craigslist is free to post and free to browse.
Joel Rothman does the recruiting for the biotech company Agamatrix in Salem.
He uses employee referrals and craigslist before turning to paid advertising, and it saves the company money.
Rothman: In the thousands, in the low couple thousand dollars maybe, nothing big like ten, twenty thousand dollars, but definitely if I get ten applications from craigslist before I need to post on other boards at 200 dollars a posting that’s two thousand dollars right there.
And Craigslist has paid off for Agamatrix.
Rothman himself found his job on the website, and he says it frequently brings in high quality applications.
He doesn’t use newspapers at all to recruit applicants.
Kennedy: Competing with free is pretty much an impossible thing to do.
Dan Kennedy is a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University and a writer for the Boston Phoenix.
He says online classifieds—and not just Craigslist—have taken a huge chunk of revenue away from newspapers, which earn about thirty percent of their revenue from classifieds.
Kennedy: I guess what people like me worry about is that, yeah this is a great thing for consumers, but the old model helped fund the kind of public interest journalism that we all care about. And that’s now being completely undermined because the economic basis for it is being undermined.
Kennedy predicts the trend toward online advertising will have a permanent impact on newspapers’ revenues.
But some New Hampshire papers might have some time on their side before they need to find a solution.
Salmon Press publishes weekly newspapers for the Lakes Region and North Country.
Publisher Rich Piatt says he has not been feeling the Internet threat in his circulation area.
Piatt: Because it is rural the number of people with computers in their home or Internet access isn’t as great as a metropolitan area. In fact we offer web subscriptions, anybody that has a print subscription with our newspapers gets a free web subscription. Most people that have print subscriptions to our paper don’t want the web, they don’t even want to mess with it.
Additionally, papers like his have the ultra-local appeal that doesn’t exist on a statewide classified website.
Piatt: And we give people the option if they want to advertise in more than one paper they can do it. And for example, somebody in Berlin advertising for an apartment for rent; you’d think they’d want to reach over to Littleton, but more than often they don’t.
But Piatt adds that in rural areas computer literacy is growing and people will turn more and more to buying and selling on the Internet.
Dan Kennedy puts the onus on newspapers to find a solution.
Kennedy: I really am optimistic that something new will come along to take its place, and obviously that something new will be tied to the Internet. But right now nobody knows what that will be.
And if newspapers are lucky, the solution will be as popular as Craigslist.
Fortune magazine reported there are ten million Craigslist users, and growing.
For NHPR News, this is Kerry Grens.
Newspapers' web classifieds have the same possibilities as CL. They have simply chosen to stick to the same format as their printed classifieds. Once you've browsed dynamic "for sale" listings on CL, the old four line, heavily abbreviated classified ad seems quite old fashioned, even if it is posted on the web.