Social media and Craigslist

Many of us musicians practice in the barter trade. Let’s face it. Equipment and gear is part of our world and we are never satisfied with what we have, or are enticed by something new and shiny.

So, a fellow musician and friend and I were sitting in the Mongolian Bar-b-Que restaurant discussing social media and how anybody makes money. The question that came up in our conversation is how do we/you make money? I talked about ad revenue and gathering data, but the next question was: what about Craigslist? How do they make money? They have no ads and they don’t charge.

I was curious and decided to do a little research. If you type Craigslist in Google almost immediately the autofill starts “craig’s list how do they make money”, so obviously this has been on other peoples minds. The top response comes from an article from Patrick (2013) in the Houston Chronicle. Here we find that all ads are not free. Some jobs and apartment listings cost depending on major city location. This income amounted to $6 billion in 2010, which was down from a high of $19.6 billion in 2000. Craigslist does make money. A lot of money.

So the final question is: Is Craigslist social media? Not sure. Some of the site is an online classified, but certainly quite a bit of social interaction happens on Craigslist. I don’t need to go into the weird details, but many communicate through the forums and ads. So I would give a partial yes to that question.

Prof. T.

Patrick, K (2013,). How Craigslist makes money. Houston Chronicle.