Craigslist 2009 Revenue to Hit $100 Million

by Jordan Yerman | June 10, 2009 at 10:18 am

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Craigslist may not know much about website theming, but it knows how to make money. The online classified's projected 2009 revenue is expected to top $100 million. This is a 23% increase over last year's profit.

Most of craigslist's ads are posted by users free of charge, but job listings and New York real estate ads cost $25 each. Job listings in Craigslist's hometown of San Francisco cost $75.

It believes that 80 percent of the revenue will come from recruitment ads--the Craigslist site claims there are more than 1 million new job listings every month--and most of the remainder from real estate ads in New York.

Let's assume that the AIM Group's report is vaguely accurate. Such potentially large revenues can be contrasted with newspaper classified advertising, which is plummeting like the jowls of an unhappy judge--down 29 percent, according to the News Association of America.

However, the second paragraph above isn't the whole story... since Craigslist axed its adult services section, other online classifieds have reaped the benefits, as those seeking to promote "adult services" have found new pastures in existing publications. Whereas they flocked to Craigslist because it was free, now paying to post is the only option.

Other papers have also noticed drastically improved numbers since the Craigslist shift. Beaujon points to Mark Bartel, the publisher of Minneapolis' City Pages, who says adult ads there have "almost doubled." and SF Weekly, which ran 160 adult ads the week before Craigslist's new standards dropped; last week, it had 910. Will this trend hold, and could newspapers begin to absorb back their lost market share in classified advertising?