We’ve received a lot of feedback and questions about the newest updates to Craigslist.
In case you have not heard or read about it, Craigslist is going to start charging $5 per ad posted on Dec 3rd.
They also posted information about bulk posting.
Well, we have to give it up to Craig Alexander Newmark for his wonderful list, and keeping it mostly free all these years. He’s connected millions of people with places to work, places to live, things to buy, and of course… people to love.
Craigslist (was) “a free online internet classifieds site” that started about a decade ago by a brilliant hippie named Craig Newark. Since then, it’s grown and become bigger than Craig, and by “big” we mean as big as his investors! There in lies the magic word “investor” and that is what slowly starts to deteriorate the “free” aspect.
Maybe they will change the peace sign logo into a dollar sign? That much remains to be seen – In fact, it’s not clear what sort of things are going to change, but one thing is clear – there will be fees!
One of us reached out to craigslist and spoke to them regarding these new updates! Sadly, Craig was not available. Although they weren’t entirely convinced about their own answers, this is the picture that was painted; and in terms of clarity, that picture was an impressionist oil painting that was left in the rain.
Presenting:
The new $5-per-post Craigslist cost specifics
3rd Party vendors cannot have accounts, their clients must be the account holders.
Clients need to sign up for a “paid account” they then can request API documentation to have their inventory “bulk” posted.
EACH individual account must prepay for the bulk posting.
$6000 is the prepay amount. So they must prepay for 1000+ posts at a time.
They say there us no expiration for the unused prepay posts, but they will ask users to “try to use up” the 1000+ posts within a 3 month period.
For our Auto Dealers on The Dealer Cloud, National Automotive Direct, or 365inventory, this update does not impact our functionality or your dashboard at ALL. Our tools will still work, exactly the same. We can also connect to their api for anyone that needs it and bulk feed inventory – no problems there. For manually posting, our tool still works as usual. In no way does this CL update affect us, as a tool. For you guys, yes, you’ll need to decide what to do about this $5. Please keep in mind, every single vendor, every competitor of yours, and ours, will have this same issue of $5 per ad posted, no one gets around it. So on a price competitive level, everyone is on the same playing field. This will pretty much kill all these automated posters, which will also put everyone on the same field.