Craig Newmark began the service in as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It became a web-based service in and expanded into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U. In March , Spanish , French , Italian , German , and Portuguese became the first non-English languages Craigslist supported.

Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL , MindVox and Usenet , and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event postings. This led to the addition of a jobs category. User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow.

The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June Majordomo had been installed and the mailing list "Craigslist" resumed operations. Community members started asking for a web interface. In the fall of , the name "List Foundation" was introduced and Craigslist started transitioning to the use of this name.

In April , when Newmark learned of other organizations called "List Foundation", the use of this name was dropped. Craigslist incorporated as a private for-profit company in By April , there were nine employees working out of Newmark's San Francisco apartment. In January , current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO.

Buckmaster contributed the site's multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. He was promoted to CEO in November The website expanded into nine more U. On the same day, a new section called "Gigs" was added, where low-cost and unpaid jobs and internships can be posted free.

With more than 80 million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives more than 2 million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.

In , Craigslist operated with a staff of 28 people. In December , at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wall Street analysts that Craigslist had little interest in maximizing profit, and instead preferred to help users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates.

Craigslist's main source of revenue is paid job ads in select American cities. The company does not formally disclose financial or ownership information.

As of April [update] , there have been no substantive changes to the usefulness or non-advertising nature of the site—no banner ads, charges for a few services provided to businesses.

The company was believed to be owned principally by Newmark, Buckmaster and eBay the three board members. In April , eBay announced it was suing Craigslist to "safeguard its four-year financial investment". On June 19, , eBay Inc. The move came shortly before eBay's planned spin-off of PayPal , and an effort to divest other units to focus on its core business.

As of , mashup sites such as padmapper. In June , Craigslist changed its terms of service to disallow the practice. In July , Craigslist filed a lawsuit against padmapper.

Over the years Craigslist has become a very popular online destination for arranging for dates and sex. The site is 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. In , San Francisco Craigslist's men seeking men section was attributed to facilitating sexual encounters and was the second most common correlation to syphilis infections.

Advertisements for "adult" previously "erotic" services were initially given special treatment, then closed entirely on September 4 , , following a controversy over claims by state attorneys general that the advertisements promoted prostitution. In , a disclaimer was put on the "men seeking men", "casual encounters", "erotic services", and "rants and raves" boards to ensure that those who clicked on these sections were over the age of 18, but no disclaimer was put on the "men seeking women", "women seeking men" or "women seeking women" boards.

As a response to charges of discrimination and negative stereotyping , Buckmaster explained that the company's policy is a response to user feedback requesting the warning on the more sexually explicit sections, including "men seeking men".

Murder by Craigslist - The Atlantic

On May 13, , Craigslist announced that it would close the erotic services section, replacing it with an adult services section to be reviewed by Craigslist employees. This decision came after allegations by several U. On September 4, , Craigslist closed the adult services section of its website in the United States. The site initially replaced the adult services page link with the word "censored" in white-on-black text. The site received criticism and complaints from attorneys general that the section's ads were facilitating prostitution and child sex trafficking.

The adult services section link was still active in countries outside of the U. It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression.

On September 8 , , the "censored" label and its dead link to adult services were completely removed. Craigslist announced on September 15, , that it had closed its adult services in the United States for good. However, it defended its right to carry such ads and its efforts to fight prostitution and sex trafficking. Free speech and some sex crime victim advocates criticized the removal of the section, saying that it threatened free speech and that it diminished law enforcement's ability to track criminals.

However, the removal was applauded by many state attorneys general and some other groups fighting sex crimes. Craigslist said that there is some indication that those who posted ads in the adult services section are posting elsewhere. On December 19 , , after pressure from Ottawa and several provinces, Craigslist closed 'Erotic Services' and 'Adult Gigs' from its Canadian website, even though prostitution was not itself illegal in Canada at the time. Craigslist has a user flagging system to quickly identify illegal and inappropriate postings.

Users may flag postings they believe to be in violation of Craigslist guidelines. Flagging does not require account login or registration, and can be done anonymously by anyone. The number of flags required for a posting's removal is dynamically variable and remains unknown to all but Craigslist staff.

Flagging can also alert Craigslist staff to blocks of ads requiring manual oversight or removal. Craigslist includes a barter option in its "for sale" section.

This growing trade economy has been documented on the television program Barter Kings and the blog One red paperclip. In July , the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Craigslist for allowing ads from dog breeders, and thereby allegedly encouraging the over-breeding and irresponsible selling of pit bulls in the Bay Area.

In January , the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an editorial criticizing Craigslist for moving into local communities and "threatening to eviscerate" local alternative newspapers. Craigslist has been compared to Walmart , a multinational corporation that some feel crushes small local businesses when they move into towns and offer a huge assortment of goods at lower prices.

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". The Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist. In , 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.

This led users to criticize Craigslist for trying to shut down a service that was useful to them. The word "Craigslist Killer" has been used by many media outlets to describe how murderers use the site to commit Internet homicide. Craigslist was also criticized for Internet fraud and E-fencing and how the site easily lures victims and facilitates murders, scams, and the sale of stolen goods.

Craiglist has argued that it has consistently worked to fight fraud, scams and human trafficking - in , Craig Newmark received an award from the FBI for cooperation with law enforcement to fight human trafficking.

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". Since , the Craigslist Foundation has hosted eight annual conferences called Boot Camp, an in-person event that focuses on skills for connecting, motivating and inspiring greater community involvement and impact.

The Craigslist Foundation is also the fiscal sponsor for Our Good Works, the organization that manages AllforGood. As of summer , the Craigslist Foundation's functions are mostly moved to LikeMinded.

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