Craigslist's new adult ad standards are helping its competitors

Posted by Emma Heald on June 10, 2009 at 3:15 PM

Classifieds website Craigslist has provided a noteworthy boost to alt-weeklies' adult classifieds revenue after its recent policy change that requires closer regulation of its adult-services classified ads. This is an ironic turn of events for the online colossus of classifieds that has wrought havoc on its competition, in print and online, ever since 2005.

The Washington City Paper reported increases in adult ads of 38% compared to one year ago, a change Andrew Beaujon from the paper's City Desk blog correlates directly to Craigslist's tougher regulation of their adult ads. Beaujon reminisces that for alt-weeklies like his, "Craigslist's free classifieds were an extinction-level event." But now Craigslist's requires would-be adult-services advertisers to waver that their posts contain no "content that is unlawful, pornographic, or which advertises illegal services", no ads "suggesting or implying an exchange of sexual favors for money", and no "pornographic images, or images suggestive of an offer of sexual favors.". These stricter standards have driven adult advertisers away from Craigslist, resulting in the higher figures for the local papers and free weeklies that used to account for so much of the classifieds market.

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?

The decision to "raise the standards" of Craigslist's adult-services ads was prompted by considerable amounts of pressure to remove portions of the site, which are "used as a vehicle to advertise or solicit prostitution", as South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster puts it in a letter addressed to the CEO of Craigslist, Jim Buckmaster.

Since the new standards have been put in place, Buckmaster has taken to the blogosphere in an attempt to level the playing field, citing numerous examples of adult ads on a competitor backpage.com's site whose "TITLES ALONE contain more explicit content than you will find in all craigslist adult service ads combined," he writes in the post. Will competitor sites soon come under legal and political fire as well for having lax standards like Craigslist once did?

Despite the bad press Attorney General McMaster generated for the site, and the seemingly unfair advantage granted to Craigslist's competitors who haven't been pressured into more stringent regulation of their adult ads, as well as being connected to two East Coast murders within the last three months (in both cases the alleged murderers found their victims by responding to casual encounters ads on Craigslist), the site is slated to bring in $100 million in revenue this year, according to estimates by AIM Group/Classified Intelligence. That computes to a 23% increase from last year's figures, an impressive amount of growth considering Craigslist's generally ailing competitors in the newspaper industry.

It seems Craigslist will have little problems with its diminished adult classifieds ad revenue, however, the boost given to competing papers and sites that thrive on classified ads represents a significant turn of events in a sector that has been dominated by the free-classifieds site for the last four years. Are there other more mainstream services from which newspapers might be able reclaim revenue?

Source: Editor & Publisher, Washington City Paper