September 14, 2005 - Free to List

In case you don’t know, CraigsList is changing the game. To borrow a word from the dot-com years, it’s the biggest paradigm shift since Napster. Now, instead of paying to advertise a car, an apartment or a job in the local newspaper, people are doing it for free on CraigList, an advertiser-free, easy-as-pie website that everyone is using.

Classified advertising is the bread and butter of local newspapers. And, don’t think for a second that the News-Press is not scared of being “c-Listed”, a term that Ed made up yesterday to describe a newspaper forced into bankruptcy after losing their advertising revenue to CraigsList. Both Wendy McCaw and her charming fiancé Nipper (with two p’s) are trying to prevent being c-listed by requiring that web-users pay them money before they can have access to their two websites.

Ed sides with Craig. Websites should not charge. It’s easy to see that if there are pay-to-play sites and free-to-see sites doing pretty much the same thing, free will prevail in the long run.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com spent some time on the Santa Barbara CraigsList web site. We downloaded the last 100 auto-for-sale ads to see what the average asking price of a used car was on the website. We found that about half of the ads were not really from Santa Barbara, didn’t have a price, or were duplicates. Prices ranged from $100 for ...

1993 Ford escort wagon. Fair condition. Recently had brake springs replaced, oil changed, general upkeep. As far as I know, it has a blown head gasket, and I just got a new car so I just need to get rid of it. Passed smog in June, and brake and lamp inspection. Registered thru this month, but was just smogged. It runs, but not well due to the head gasket. If you can fix this it is a great car for transportation. It got me cross-country last year. First 100.00 obo gets it.

To $75,000 for ...

2003 Porsche Arctic Silver Carrera 4S with black full leather, 6 speed manual, Xenon head lamps, heated seats, lumbar support, Bose high end stereo package, CD changer (6 disc), sports exhaust, carbon fiber (steering wheel, parking brake, and shifter), radar, new tires. Full warranty. 14,000 miles.

As you can see by the graphic above, the data was quite skewed. So even though 46% of the cars were selling for less than $5,000, the average price of all cars was $7,528. One contestant yesterday seemed to have done a little more work than the dedicated staff. He calculated the average sale price since August 1st to be $6,570. It’s likely that the Carrera skewed our data, but the way this thing works is that we use our numbers to award the daily prize.

Pizon Pony, with a guess of $7,540, is the winner of yesterday’s contest. Pizon wins an Edhat t-shirt - runs great, passed smog, full warranty.

Want to get instant fame and cool prizes? ... enter today’s contest

We want to hear from you ... tell us what you think of this tidbit