Reasons For Craigslist Popularity

These days everyone is talking about Craigslist. It is becoming a hit for a lot of people especially Internet marketers. Now, it is the top classified ads service, and is the top ten of Internet companies. They were founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark for the San Francisco Bay area. After being successful, it expanded into nine more cities in the U.S. After that, it has established itself in approximately 450 cities in 50 countries.

Craigslist is a central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements that can help websites become known. There are vast genre of topics that are advertised, namely jobs, internships, housing, personals, and erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume and pets. There are even forums on these topics. Ever since they have been widely used, it really helps emerging nonprofit organizations get established, attract the attention of potential donors, gain more visibility and develop the skills and knowledge required for a long-term success with websites. On the other hand, since there are various kinds of topics that can be advertised, it has been "used" by some irresponsible people as a vehicle for wrong doings. This has caused quite a stir.

Ever since it was established, they have had their ups and downs. Many controversies were faced by them before. It was used as a medium of all sorts of illegal Internet activities. Craigslist was once sued for allowing imprudent individuals who posted fraudulent ads just to obtain personal information about people. This information includes email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses. The worst thing is that, these information and photos obtained were publicly posted online. In September 2007, a woman was charged for using them as a medium for running her underage prostitution service. She pleaded guilty. Last year, in the same month, a Michigan woman was also charged by the court of law for using their websites to hire a contract killer to murder someone who is her romantic rival. Numerous illegal activities were going on in craigslist.

In order to banish all these illegal activities done by irresponsible people, craigslist has set its own terms and conditions. Additionally, visitors can flag an ad if they think it is against the site policy. There are a few categories that visitors can choose to flag from, such as spam or prohibited etc. Though postings are free, due to its strict regulations these days, it is hard to get your ad approved. Sometimes there are visitors who will flag your ad too. Thus, this will make things hard for users who look for traffic for their websites.

Besides craigslist, there are some other not so popular online advertisements sites too. Other alternatives such as Sell.com, Alibaba.com, ec21.com can be a good choice because they offer free advertisements too. Although they are not a hit, they are friendlier towards businesses that needs traffic via links. Most of them are Google base. Some of these sites charges reasonably, but most of them are free. For example Sales Spider.com, it offers somewhat like craigslist has to offer too. Some users who opt for a "cleaner" list prefer to pay rather than advertising with them.