Published: Aug. 25, 2006 at 4:21 PM CDT|Updated: Sep. 5, 2006 at 4:06 PM CDT
By Paul Musgrave
Craigslist, the San Francisco-based online classifieds service, has opened a site for Evansville (http://evansville.craigslist.org). The Evansville site was launched as part of a major expansion of Craigslist in June 2006.
Craigslist, founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 and long popular in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, attracts more than 10 million users monthly.
Susan MacTavish Best, a spokeswoman for Craigslist, said the Evansville site receives about 400,000 page views per month and about 1,000 new classified ads monthly.
Many observers have said that Craigslist, which is free to use for both buyers and sellers (except for job listings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York and brokered housing ads in New York) poses a threat to established media outlets that depend on classified ad revenue. A 2004 study claimed that the site cost newspapers in San Francisco between $50 million and $65 million. This week, The Economist wrote that Craigslist "has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income."
Best said that Craigslist tends "not to have any expectations" for growth or audience numbers for new sites. "We just hope that the locals find the site useful to get their everyday stuff done quickly and easily," Best said.
The site's low-key launch this summer was by design, Best said. "We do no marketing or promotion of the site at all. We rely solely on word of mouth which we've found works pretty well," she said.
