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Great Events from History: The 21st Century (2000-2016)

Craigslist Continues To Generate Controversy

by Sally Driscoll

Craigslist’s innovative business model as a community-oriented online bulletin board made it the premier site for advertising goods, real estate, employment opportunities, and services during the 2000s. Though originally based in San Francisco, the company expanded both domestically and internationally during the decade, generating tens of millions of users worldwide.

Locale: San Francisco, California

Categories: Business and economics; Scandals; Internet

Key Figures

Craig Newmark (b. 1952), computer programmer who founded the website Craigslist

Jim Buckmaster (b. 1962), computer programmer who became CEO of Craigslist in 2000

Philip Markoff (1986-2010), medical student who murdered Julissa Brisman in Boston on April 14, 2009

Summary of Events

Craigslist is named for its founder, Craig Newmark, who began to maintain an email list of events for the San Francisco community in the mid-1990s. As “Craig’s list” became unwieldy, he created a website on which to host the listings. To pay for the service, Newmark began to charge a minimal fee to post certain employment and real estate listings. In 1999, Newmark decided to incorporate and hired Jim Buckmaster as a programmer. Soon after, he named Buckmaster chief executive officer (CEO), which freed Newmark to handle customer service and other behind-the-scenes tasks.

The company began to expand within the United States in 2000, creating individual web pages for cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Craigslist became an international company in 2001 with the creation of a site for Vancouver, Canada. By the end of the decade, Craigslist had grown into a worldwide phenomenon, generating billions of hits each month and earning tens of millions of dollars.

Services

In addition to event listings, Craigslist offered free classified advertisements for jobs, cars, apartments, and household and other items as well as advertisements for professional and personal services. Bartering was common, as were listings for free items. Craigslist’s popularity has been attributed especially to the speed and ease of publishing such advertisements online, as opposed to in traditional print magazines and newspapers, as well as the tendency to receive faster responses.

Craigslist also offered social networking opportunities, personal ads for users seeking romantic or sexual partners, and forums in which users could discuss politics, the arts, or dozens of other topics. New discussion forums opened regularly upon popular request, focusing on heated topics such as taxes and politics as well more innocuous topics such as diets and shopping. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the United States’ Gulf Coast in 2005, Craigslist set up a hurricane forum to aid with relief and offer an outlet for those affected by the storm.

The virtual lack of a maximum word count for listings on Craigslist encouraged users to create imaginative sales pitches, and advertisements for such ordinary items as used cars or pieces of furniture at times became quirky short stories, humorous autobiographical narratives, or pitches for romance. In 2000 Craigslist introduced the “best of Craigslist” section, which collected posts that users flagged as particularly humorous, insightful, or bizarre. Many of the listings in this section were culled from craigslist’s “missed connections” category, in which users posted messages in the hope of connecting with strangers they had encountered on public transportation, at events, or in other public venues.

Controversies

As the volume of postings increased at an exponential rate, Newmark, Buckmaster, and their small workforce were unable to read each listing to ensure that it did not violate the law or craigslist’s policies. Instead, they began to rely on users to flag illegal or especially offensive listings. They also posted detailed user guidelines and warnings about adult content or scams as relevant to each area of the site. Nevertheless, illegal postings at times remained online too long. Some housing ads violated the federal Fair Housing Act by specifying the preferred racial background, gender, or sexual orientation of prospective tenants. Some users tried to sell illegal items, such as fireworks, stolen property, or jammers intended to block cell phone calls or GPS systems, or other items specifically listed as off-limits by Craigslist. Scammers paying with counterfeit money orders or checks or phishing for personal information that could be used for identity theft also became a significant concern.

Craigslist also became known for attracting sexual predators, prostitutes, and drug dealers and for hosting ads for human trafficking, child pornography, and other illegal behavior, which led to a number of high-profile lawsuits. The “erotic services” category, in which users could advertise for escorts, phone sex, and other legal adult services, came under special scrutiny.

In 2009, in response to a lawsuit filed by multiple state attorneys general over charges of abetting prostitution, Craigslist dropped erotic services in favor of “adult services.” They also began charging for adult services ads and accepting payment by credit card only, employed attorneys to screen the ads for illegal behavior, and implemented a phone verification system. After facing additional complaints and lawsuits, the company took down the adult services section completely. Another website, Backpage.com, quickly replaced Craigslist as the standard place for escorts to advertise their services.

A few highly publicized murder cases also tainted Craigslist’s image. In October of 2007, nineteen-year-old Michael John Anderson lured twenty-four-year-old Katherine Ann Olson to his home and shot her to death after she responded to a fake ad for a nanny. In 2009, twenty-three-year-old Philip Markoff, a student at Boston University, robbed three women who had placed advertisements for adult services and murdered one of them, twenty-six-year-old Julissa Brisman.

As an easy-to-use site allowing users to post free or inexpensive classified ads of unlimited length and receive nearly instant results, Craigslist proved to be a major source of competition for local and independent newspapers that provided similar services. By the end of the decade, some newspapers claimed to have lost millions of dollars in classified advertising revenue to the site at a time in which that income was needed to offset declining subscription numbers. In light of this effect, some newspaper publishers accused Craigslist of contributing to the widespread decline of the industry during this period.

Significance

Although Craigslist generated controversy during the 2000s, the site was one of the most innovative of the decade and served as a prototype for other e-commerce sites. Its success is all the more remarkable in light of its small workforce, with only about thirty employees by the end of the decade, and its utilitarian website design. While remaining focused on its original mission to serve as a community bulletin board, Craigslist continued to expand into the next decade, launching sites dedicated to cities and regions in dozens of countries throughout the world.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Driscoll, Sally. "Craigslist Continues To Generate Controversy." Great Events from History: The 21st Century (2000-2016), edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GE21A_0048.

APA 7th

Driscoll, S. (2017). Craigslist Continues To Generate Controversy. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), Great Events from History: The 21st Century (2000-2016). Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Driscoll, Sally. "Craigslist Continues To Generate Controversy." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. Great Events from History: The 21st Century (2000-2016). Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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