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Craigslist is often held up as an example of a company "doing it right", but what is never mentioned in these posts is that a large portion of their revenue com

Craigslist is often held up as an example of a company "doing it right", but what is never mentioned in these posts is that a large portion of their revenue comes from facilitating scams. Around 25% of rooms/apartments I contact are scams, and Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these. A common scam is to take pictures from a real estate site of a house that recently sold and advertise it as for rent, but they don't even let you say "I live at this house and do not want to rent it, don't let anyone post it".

socalgal2 4mo ago
It's also one of the major things the destroyed newspapers. I'm not saying that's bad, just pointing out it happened.
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Zigurd 4mo ago
    Indeed, conflating local news with local newspapers is a mistake. They were able to support news gathering by monopolizing print advertising. They were also overly dependent on the municipal government and police for access, and were therefore often timid on certain subjects.
    - burpingtree 4mo ago
      I’m confused. Are you saying that local news is in a better place with the demise of local newspapers. What better has taken their place?
      - Zigurd 4mo ago
        I very deliberately did not say that local news is now better, just back in the day when it was supported by an ad monopoly, it still had big problems. There was a lot of access journalism dependent on staying on the good side of the police, and on not annoying the car dealers running full page ads, for example. Citizen journalism has issues, too. Many of them are resource issues, so supporting things like a cap on fees and short deadlines on FOIA requests, would help a lot.
  - pm90 4mo ago
    Well that kind of gating actually kept the scams out so I have mixed feelings about it.
    - jeffbee 4mo ago
      You can't have lived through that era and believe that print classifieds were scam-free. I'm sure the rate is higher today, but in the newspaper era it wasn't zero. In fact there's an unbroken lineage going back decades of the exact same fake rental scam prevalent on Craigslist today.
  - dghlsakjg 4mo ago
    It wasn’t a monopoly. There were tons of ways to advertise selling your used car (e.g. most towns did and still do have a high traffic spot where people will go park the car with a for sale sign, or - more directly in competition with local papers - were car classifieds publications distributed for free. These cost more than newspapers to place an ad and tended to target the enthusiast market). Besides that, newspapers competed with each other. In the heyday of print, it was pretty rare - almost unheard of - that there weren’t multiple publishers in any market, even small towns. Kind of the anti definition of monopoly. Hell, the US constitution literally encodes the right for anyone to publish a newspaper. Even now, most markets have several options for buying print classifieds. An “expensive” offering from a variety of vendors that happens to be effective is not a monopoly, it’s just businesses pricing at value not cost. The $50 was what many people, apparently, were happy to pay to have their ad distributed daily for a few weeks, on paper, delivered to the homes of thousands of people. Look up the cost of a full size ad in a print publication, and classifieds look like a pretty good deal.
a2tech 4mo ago
Airbnb has the same exact problem. Also doesn’t seem to give a crap when they’re reported.
- nunez 4mo ago
  Except AirBnB _does_ make money off of those scam listings.
jeffbee 4mo ago
Craigslist doesn't even charge for rental listings, do they? I thought they only charge for help wanted ads.
- criddell 4mo ago
  They charge for rental listings in some markets.
  - jeffbee 4mo ago
    Interesting. I wonder why they feel it is not necessary or not profitable to do it in the Bay Area.
- floren 4mo ago
  They now charge to list your car, even as a private party. I'm not sure it was the right choice because it drove so much traffic to Facebook Marketplace, which is an absolute disaster.
jedberg 4mo ago
Craigslist doesn't make any money from those scams because they don't charge for rental listings. It sucks that it's there, but for them to hire staff to deal with it, they'd have to charge for the rental listings. Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.
- wyre 4mo ago
  So why not charge for rental listings? i'm sure the number of scams would go down, while posting would still be of good value for someone looking to rent out a $3000/mo apartment.
  - jubilanti 4mo ago
    They do in some markets like NYC specifically because of scams.
  - everforward 4mo ago
    It’s not what they do, and it’s a crowded market where they don’t really have an edge. If you want well-vetted products, don’t go to Craigslist. They’re just digital classifieds, the tradition is basically “anyone can list them, no one checks them, caveat emptor”. It’s weird to me they even carry real estate listings, because I’m surprised anyone would trust them with that kind of money on a good you can’t easily self-validate. I wouldn’t spend more than $100 on something from Craigslist if I wasn’t confident that I can judge the quality of it myself.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - jedberg 4mo ago
      The people who get scammed are the ones that rent sight-unseen. But most people visit the apartment they are going to rent, and the smart ones don't pay any money until they've done so. If you're really paranoid, you verify that that the person you are talking to is actually the owner, or a valid representative of the owner.
jackconsidine 4mo ago
From Craig's Wikipedia article [0]. He sure cares about fighting scams. Craigslist != Craig I know, but may these are intractable problems, not that there's necessarily negligence > In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40] > In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41] > In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark
dstroot 4mo ago
I once wanted to build an alternative to Craig’s list. There were SO MANY things I had ideas to improve. Then I realized I had literally no idea how Craig’s list makes money. None. They did not charge for ads and they didn’t have advertising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- BeetleB 4mo ago
  IIRC, he said the bulk of revenue comes from job listings.
  - dstroot 4mo ago
    Thanks!
  - KennyBlanken 4mo ago
    You misspelled "ads for prostitution." Which they eventually stopped doing, only after considerable public pressure and state AGs threatening criminal prosecution. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-services-ads-whats-the-real-impact https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-ser... Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
    - SXX 4mo ago
      Its not a private business fault that US did not create a legal framework protecting sex workers and instead continue facilitate exploitation and traffiking by keeping it illegal. US have legal porn industry and its strictly regulated and mostly safe for those wofking in it. Imagine how it would look like if it was illegal too.
      - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
        Are you proposing that forming an S-corp somehow eliminates an individuals moral or ethical obligations?
bredren 4mo ago
Yes. Even if you take out revenue from scams, it does not change the question of what Craigslist could or should have done regarding governance. Craigslist adhered to basic features and community volunteers partly to avoid responsibility. The org had no problem enforcing its moat around UGC (posts) with lawsuits but only at after extraordinary foot dragging did they implement basic advancements in the best interests of their own community. This has resulted in untold numbers of scam victims, yes but also it allowed bad landlords, (and tenants) to carry on with no repercussions. This continues, actually. Craigslist was a benevolent dictator. It squandered an opportunity to be a low profit leader of p2p, instead yielding it to Facebook and a variety of venture backed products. I have first hand knowledge of Craigslist response to market competition because my cofounder on Gliph and I are the creators of the product that Craigslist privacy relay email service is based on. This point of who actually created the concept and tech is actually being litigated right now between Apple and a patent troll over the Hide My Email feature of iCloud in Rally vs. Apple Inc.
- rsync 4mo ago
  Anon.penet.fi is clear prior art - from 1993[1]. Anyone who thought they had invented something new here were kidding themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
  - bredren 4mo ago
    Wow, I wasn’t aware of this and it definitely predates our work. I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not. IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.
    - ahazred8ta 4mo ago
      [wasn’t aware of this] That's odd. Anyone familiar with the history of anonymous email services and remailers would know about the penet, cotse, and cypherpunk communities in the 1990s. It was a fertile field. Odd that you haven't bumped into anyone from that space. https://codamail.com/aboutus.html https://codamail.com/aboutus.html -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion -- https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html
dfxm12 4mo ago
Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc. As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.
ForHackernews 4mo ago
If only 25% of one section of CL is scams, that puts it well ahead of the cryptocurrency industry, the social media industry, the adtech industry and the AI industry.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  2026, where "We're scammy, but not as scammy as the rest of tech" is a genuine USP.
hamdingers 4mo ago
> Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these You could make your point without this lie. Craigslist moderators are both very active and quick to respond. Their moderation system is explained on the website. Try flagging scams when you see them.
Quekid5 4mo ago
Ask for more regulation.
ilamont 4mo ago
Craigslist also undermined the entire newspaper classifieds business, which paid for local news reporting in communities of all sizes. Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
bag_boy 4mo ago
Additionally, they are one of the few for-profit companies that uses “.org” with a straight face. Even if it was not the original intent, it’s somewhat deceptive to keep it.
insane_dreamer 4mo ago
> a large portion of their revenue comes from facilitating scams. Around 25% of rooms/apartments I contact are scams they don't charge for rental posts in most cities, so your conclusion is false
burpingtree 4mo ago
Even beyond scams they are one of the biggest factors leading to the collapse of the local news industry that was funded by local classified ads. So it’s hard at a macro level to view them as doing it right in a global sense, but they did make Craig rich.
AbstractH24 4mo ago
Its the ultimate libertarian paradox. How can you both preserve peoples rights and also intervene to stop when you subjecivley think something should be regulated?

socalgal2 4mo ago

It's also one of the major things the destroyed newspapers. I'm not saying that's bad, just pointing out it happened.

jeffbee 4mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Zigurd 4mo ago
  Indeed, conflating local news with local newspapers is a mistake. They were able to support news gathering by monopolizing print advertising. They were also overly dependent on the municipal government and police for access, and were therefore often timid on certain subjects.
  - burpingtree 4mo ago
    I’m confused. Are you saying that local news is in a better place with the demise of local newspapers. What better has taken their place?
    - Zigurd 4mo ago
      I very deliberately did not say that local news is now better, just back in the day when it was supported by an ad monopoly, it still had big problems. There was a lot of access journalism dependent on staying on the good side of the police, and on not annoying the car dealers running full page ads, for example. Citizen journalism has issues, too. Many of them are resource issues, so supporting things like a cap on fees and short deadlines on FOIA requests, would help a lot.
- pm90 4mo ago
  Well that kind of gating actually kept the scams out so I have mixed feelings about it.
  - jeffbee 4mo ago
    You can't have lived through that era and believe that print classifieds were scam-free. I'm sure the rate is higher today, but in the newspaper era it wasn't zero. In fact there's an unbroken lineage going back decades of the exact same fake rental scam prevalent on Craigslist today.
- dghlsakjg 4mo ago
  It wasn’t a monopoly. There were tons of ways to advertise selling your used car (e.g. most towns did and still do have a high traffic spot where people will go park the car with a for sale sign, or - more directly in competition with local papers - were car classifieds publications distributed for free. These cost more than newspapers to place an ad and tended to target the enthusiast market). Besides that, newspapers competed with each other. In the heyday of print, it was pretty rare - almost unheard of - that there weren’t multiple publishers in any market, even small towns. Kind of the anti definition of monopoly. Hell, the US constitution literally encodes the right for anyone to publish a newspaper. Even now, most markets have several options for buying print classifieds. An “expensive” offering from a variety of vendors that happens to be effective is not a monopoly, it’s just businesses pricing at value not cost. The $50 was what many people, apparently, were happy to pay to have their ad distributed daily for a few weeks, on paper, delivered to the homes of thousands of people. Look up the cost of a full size ad in a print publication, and classifieds look like a pretty good deal.

a2tech 4mo ago

Airbnb has the same exact problem. Also doesn’t seem to give a crap when they’re reported.

nunez 4mo ago
Except AirBnB _does_ make money off of those scam listings.

jeffbee 4mo ago

Craigslist doesn't even charge for rental listings, do they? I thought they only charge for help wanted ads.

criddell 4mo ago
They charge for rental listings in some markets.
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  Interesting. I wonder why they feel it is not necessary or not profitable to do it in the Bay Area.
floren 4mo ago
They now charge to list your car, even as a private party. I'm not sure it was the right choice because it drove so much traffic to Facebook Marketplace, which is an absolute disaster.

jedberg 4mo ago

Craigslist doesn't make any money from those scams because they don't charge for rental listings. It sucks that it's there, but for them to hire staff to deal with it, they'd have to charge for the rental listings. Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.

wyre 4mo ago
So why not charge for rental listings? i'm sure the number of scams would go down, while posting would still be of good value for someone looking to rent out a $3000/mo apartment.
- jubilanti 4mo ago
  They do in some markets like NYC specifically because of scams.
- everforward 4mo ago
  It’s not what they do, and it’s a crowded market where they don’t really have an edge. If you want well-vetted products, don’t go to Craigslist. They’re just digital classifieds, the tradition is basically “anyone can list them, no one checks them, caveat emptor”. It’s weird to me they even carry real estate listings, because I’m surprised anyone would trust them with that kind of money on a good you can’t easily self-validate. I wouldn’t spend more than $100 on something from Craigslist if I wasn’t confident that I can judge the quality of it myself.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jedberg 4mo ago
    The people who get scammed are the ones that rent sight-unseen. But most people visit the apartment they are going to rent, and the smart ones don't pay any money until they've done so. If you're really paranoid, you verify that that the person you are talking to is actually the owner, or a valid representative of the owner.

jackconsidine 4mo ago

From Craig's Wikipedia article [0]. He sure cares about fighting scams. Craigslist != Craig I know, but may these are intractable problems, not that there's necessarily negligence > In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40] > In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41] > In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark

dstroot 4mo ago

I once wanted to build an alternative to Craig’s list. There were SO MANY things I had ideas to improve. Then I realized I had literally no idea how Craig’s list makes money. None. They did not charge for ads and they didn’t have advertising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BeetleB 4mo ago
IIRC, he said the bulk of revenue comes from job listings.
- dstroot 4mo ago
  Thanks!
- KennyBlanken 4mo ago
  You misspelled "ads for prostitution." Which they eventually stopped doing, only after considerable public pressure and state AGs threatening criminal prosecution. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-services-ads-whats-the-real-impact https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-ser... Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
  - SXX 4mo ago
    Its not a private business fault that US did not create a legal framework protecting sex workers and instead continue facilitate exploitation and traffiking by keeping it illegal. US have legal porn industry and its strictly regulated and mostly safe for those wofking in it. Imagine how it would look like if it was illegal too.
    - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
      Are you proposing that forming an S-corp somehow eliminates an individuals moral or ethical obligations?

bredren 4mo ago

Yes. Even if you take out revenue from scams, it does not change the question of what Craigslist could or should have done regarding governance. Craigslist adhered to basic features and community volunteers partly to avoid responsibility. The org had no problem enforcing its moat around UGC (posts) with lawsuits but only at after extraordinary foot dragging did they implement basic advancements in the best interests of their own community. This has resulted in untold numbers of scam victims, yes but also it allowed bad landlords, (and tenants) to carry on with no repercussions. This continues, actually. Craigslist was a benevolent dictator. It squandered an opportunity to be a low profit leader of p2p, instead yielding it to Facebook and a variety of venture backed products. I have first hand knowledge of Craigslist response to market competition because my cofounder on Gliph and I are the creators of the product that Craigslist privacy relay email service is based on. This point of who actually created the concept and tech is actually being litigated right now between Apple and a patent troll over the Hide My Email feature of iCloud in Rally vs. Apple Inc.

rsync 4mo ago
Anon.penet.fi is clear prior art - from 1993[1]. Anyone who thought they had invented something new here were kidding themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
- bredren 4mo ago
  Wow, I wasn’t aware of this and it definitely predates our work. I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not. IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.
  - ahazred8ta 4mo ago
    [wasn’t aware of this] That's odd. Anyone familiar with the history of anonymous email services and remailers would know about the penet, cotse, and cypherpunk communities in the 1990s. It was a fertile field. Odd that you haven't bumped into anyone from that space. https://codamail.com/aboutus.html https://codamail.com/aboutus.html -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion -- https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html

dfxm12 4mo ago

Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc. As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.

ForHackernews 4mo ago

If only 25% of one section of CL is scams, that puts it well ahead of the cryptocurrency industry, the social media industry, the adtech industry and the AI industry.

TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
2026, where "We're scammy, but not as scammy as the rest of tech" is a genuine USP.

hamdingers 4mo ago

> Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these You could make your point without this lie. Craigslist moderators are both very active and quick to respond. Their moderation system is explained on the website. Try flagging scams when you see them.

Quekid5 4mo ago

Ask for more regulation.

ilamont 4mo ago

Craigslist also undermined the entire newspaper classifieds business, which paid for local news reporting in communities of all sizes. Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.

bag_boy 4mo ago

Additionally, they are one of the few for-profit companies that uses “.org” with a straight face. Even if it was not the original intent, it’s somewhat deceptive to keep it.

insane_dreamer 4mo ago

> a large portion of their revenue comes from facilitating scams. Around 25% of rooms/apartments I contact are scams they don't charge for rental posts in most cities, so your conclusion is false

burpingtree 4mo ago

Even beyond scams they are one of the biggest factors leading to the collapse of the local news industry that was funded by local classified ads. So it’s hard at a macro level to view them as doing it right in a global sense, but they did make Craig rich.

AbstractH24 4mo ago

Its the ultimate libertarian paradox. How can you both preserve peoples rights and also intervene to stop when you subjecivley think something should be regulated?