craigslist
Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is a privately held American company[5] operating a classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
Type of business
English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
1995 (incorporated 1999)
570 cities in 70 countries
Jim Buckmaster (CEO)
Web communications
US$660M [2]
50 (2017)
None
Optional[3]
1995
Active
Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. and Canadian cities in 2000 and now covers 70 countries.
Site characteristics[edit]
Personals[edit]
Over the years Craigslist had become a very popular online destination for arranging for dates and sex.[34][35][36][37][38] The personals section allows for postings that are for "strictly platonic", "dating/romance", and "casual encounters".[34][35][37][38]
The site was considered particularly useful by lesbians and gay men seeking to make connections, because of the service's free and open nature and because of the difficulty of otherwise finding each other in more conservative areas.[39]
In 2005, San Francisco Craigslist's men seeking men section was attributed to facilitating sexual encounters and was the second most common correlation to syphilis infections.[39] The company has been pressured by San Francisco Department of Public Health officials, prompting Jim Buckmaster to state that the site has a very small staff and that the public "must police themselves".[39] The site has, however, added links to San Francisco City Clinic and STD forums.[39]
On March 22, 2018, Craigslist discontinued its "Personals" section in the United States in response to the passing of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which removes Section 230 safe harbours for interactive services knowingly involved in illegal sex trafficking. The service stated that
Criticism[edit]
In July 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Craigslist for allowing ads from dog breeders, stating that this could encourage the over-breeding and irresponsible selling of pit bulls in the Bay Area.[67] According to Craigslist's terms of service, the sale of pets is prohibited, though re-homing with small adoption fees is acceptable.[68]
In January 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an editorial claiming that Craigslist could threaten the business of local alternative newspapers.[69]
L. Gordon Crovitz, writing for The Wall Street Journal, criticized the company for using lawsuits "to prevent anyone from doing to it what it did to newspapers", contrary to the spirit of the website, which bills itself in a "noncommercial nature, public service mission, and noncorporate culture".[70]
This article was a reaction to lawsuits from Craigslist, which Crovitz says were intended to prevent competition. Craigslist filed a trademark lawsuit against the Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist.com on July 11, 2012,[71] forcing the company to rename to JamesEdition.
In 2012, Craigslist sued PadMapper, a site that hoped to improve the user interface for browsing housing ads, and 3Taps, a company that helped PadMapper obtain data from Craigslist, in Craigslist v. 3Taps. This led users to criticize Craigslist for trying to shut down a service that was useful to them.[32]
Nonprofit foundation[edit]
In 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation,[72] a § 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that offered free and low-cost events and online resources to promote community building at all levels. It accepts charitable donations, and rather than directly funding organizations, it produces "face-to-face events and offers online resources to help grassroots organizations get off the ground and contribute real value to the community".
In 2012, the Craigslist Foundation closed, with charity work moving to support charitable funds.[73]