Classifieds in general have remained a key piece of the advertising puzzle for centuries now. A single print can garner hundreds of thousands of daily, weekly, and monthly readerships. This is leverage at its best. When a company places their advertisement inside one of these periodicals, they have the ability to capture a percentage of these people reading their ad. All this can be done within a few minutes time making this an extremely effective platform for getting messages out.
Combine this platform with the Internet, and now there is online classifieds. While the process is similar in virtually every aspect, there are still unique qualities about doing it this way opposed to that of print. The Internet boasts millions of viewers every single day, and with the popularity of sites like Craigslist this can drive far more traffic than normal print ever could. The other added benefit with a site like this is that it’s free to post and do business on it. This feature alone is driving buyers and sellers by the masses to these platforms.
In the late 1990s,this shift began to take place. There’s plenty of debate over who technically kicked the party off. One thing that isn’t debatable is the success of one company in particular. In fact, it was almost by accident that the new marriage of classifieds and the internet even occurred. Along came Craigslist, which was initially used solely as an email list by Craig Newmark. He would use this list to inform his subscribers about upcoming events surrounding the computer tech field. Subscribers began using the list as way to hire new talent in these fields, thus creating a sort of jobs board out of it. This would inevitably pave the way for online classifieds.
Like everything else in this fast moving generation, online classifieds put the buyer and seller together at warp speeds. In fact, this has become an intrinsic platform for many successful businesses today. Because of this demand, several new sites have emerged, and are poised to take the lion’s share away from an outdated Craigslist. One thing is for certain, these online classifieds aren’t going anywhere, and they’re beginning to have serious reach.
