While the rest of the internet raced toward algorithms, feeds, and AI recommendations, Craigslist stayed exactly where it started. Thirty years after Craig Newmark sent his first email list to San Francisco friends, the classifieds site still looks like it was built in 1995. Because it was.
The site draws more than 105 million monthly users and ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to internet data company Similarweb. Despite never spending money on advertising or marketing, Craigslist remains enormously profitable.
University of Pennsylvania professor Jessa Lingel calls it the “ungentrified” internet. In a digital world where every click gets tracked, analyzed, and sold, Craigslist stands alone.
Unlike Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, or DePop, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users or predict what they want to see. There are no public profiles. No rating systems. No likes or shares. No attempts to keep you scrolling endlessly.
The site works exactly how it did three decades ago. You pick a category, browse listings, and contact sellers directly. That’s it. The site effectively stops the clout-chasing and attention-seeking that dominates platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
This simplicity is deliberate. In a 2022 interview, Newmark explained his philosophy: “People tell me it gets the job done. They want it done. As I like to put it, a nerd’s got to do what a nerd’s got to do.”
Craigslist’s revenue has dropped from $1.04 billion in 2018 to a projected $302 million in 2025. That’s a steep decline, and it reflects real changes in how people buy and sell online. Competition from Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, and Mercari has pulled users away.
But here’s what the numbers don’t capture: Craigslist is still making hundreds of millions of dollars with almost no expenses. The company operates with a tiny staff and charges fees only for job ads in select cities and a few other specific listings. Everything else is free to post.
No marketing budget. No sales team. No office buildings full of executives. Just a simple website that connects people who want to buy and sell things locally.
Craig Newmark started the service in 1995 as an email list sharing local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a computer engineer in his early 40s, working at IBM and other large companies. He wasn’t trying to build a business empire. He just noticed people helping each other online and wanted to create something similar for his new city.
The list became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classified categories. Jobs, housing, items for sale. People started using it organically because it worked. Craigslist incorporated as a private company in 1999, around the time Newmark realized the site was growing fast enough that he could work on it full-time.
Newmark says his greatest achievement was creating and maintaining a “vibe”. No unnecessary changes. Success measured by how often people returned and how many new users joined. Word-of-mouth growth instead of expensive advertising campaigns.
This approach is the opposite of how most tech companies operate. Newmark stepped down as CEO in 2000 after admitting he wasn’t cut out for management. For years, he called himself a customer service representative, not an executive. He saw himself as a builder of a simple tool that created a community of users.
Comedian Megan Koester has been using Craigslist for over 15 years. She found her first writing job through a Craigslist ad, found her rent-controlled apartment there, bought land in the Mojave Desert, and furnished an entire dwelling with items from the free section.
Her Instagram account documents “harrowing images” from Craigslist’s free section. The day we spoke, she was wearing a cashmere sweater that cost nothing but faith in strangers.
Actor and comedian Kat Toledo regularly uses the site to hire cohosts for her LA-based comedy show. She’s used it to find romance, housing, and even her current full-time job as an assistant to a forensic psychologist, where she’s worked for nearly two years.
The site has also been used to cast unusual creative projects, including experimental TV shows like “The Rehearsal” on HBO and “Jury Duty” on Amazon Freevee.
User comments on Slashdot and other forums paint a mixed picture. Many people say Facebook Marketplace has eaten into Craigslist’s share of local selling. Marketplace is easier to use, has more user reach, and gets faster responses.
But others still prefer Craigslist. One user wrote: “I’d rather CL than Marketplace or Mercado Libre or whatever. Not everything requires flash and dash and java and popups and dancing red peppers.”
The trust issue cuts both ways. Some sellers say they can’t get responses on Craigslist anymore, people don’t trust listings without the social verification that comes with Facebook profiles. Others say Facebook Marketplace is full of scammers and prefer Craigslist’s anonymous simplicity.
Revenue breakdown shows the company makes 35.6% from job ads, 31% from services, and 20.3% from auto listings. These are the few categories where Craigslist charges fees, typically between $3 and $75 per posting.
Craigslist offers anonymity, doesn’t require money to change hands, and lets strangers make meaningful connections. This sounds basic, but it’s increasingly rare online.
Most platforms want your real name, your photo, your phone number, your location, your browsing history, your contacts. They want to know what you click, how long you look at each item, what you almost buy but don’t. They track you across websites and build advertising profiles.
Craigslist asks for an email address. That’s it. You can use a disposable one if you want. The site doesn’t care who you are. It just wants to help you find an apartment or sell a couch.
Professor Lingel’s description, “ungentrified internet”, captures something important. Gentrification happens when a neighborhood changes to attract wealthier residents and businesses, pushing out long-time community members. The internet has gentrified. Corporate platforms designed to extract maximum revenue have replaced simple tools designed to help people.
Craigslist is the corner store that refused to become a Whole Foods. It’s the dive bar that didn’t renovate into a cocktail lounge. It works for the people who’ve always used it, and it doesn’t care about attracting anyone else.
Can this last? The revenue decline suggests maybe not forever. From $1.04 billion in 2018 to an estimated $302 million in 2025 is a 71% drop in seven years. That trend line points toward eventual irrelevance.
But Craigslist has surprised people before. When eBay bought a minority stake in 2004, many expected the auction giant to modernize or absorb the classifieds site. Instead, Craigslist spent a decade fighting in court to buy back those shares and regain full control, which it did in 2015.
The site’s advantages remain real. It’s still the biggest classifieds platform by traffic. It has brand recognition that newer competitors can’t match. For certain categories, apartments in major cities, local services, unusual items, it’s often still the best option.
And the cost structure means Craigslist can be profitable at much lower revenue levels than venture-backed competitors. Facebook Marketplace has more users but operates at a loss as part of Meta’s broader ecosystem. OfferUp is “borderline profitable” according to industry reports. Mercari is struggling in the US market.
Craigslist doesn’t need to grow. It just needs to maintain what it has. That’s an advantage when you’re not trying to satisfy investors or hit growth targets.
Newmark is now in his 70s and has started recording oral histories about Craigslist’s early years. He’s turned his attention to charity work, supporting journalism and online security efforts.
The site he created represents something that’s mostly disappeared from the internet: a tool built for users instead of advertisers. A platform that doesn’t constantly change because change itself has become the product. A space where you can accomplish something quickly without being sold to in the process.
Young people ask if anyone still uses Craigslist. The answer is yes, 105 million people every month. That’s smaller than Facebook’s billions, but it’s not nothing. These users tend to be older, which raises questions about what happens as that demographic ages further.
But the broader question is whether the internet needs places like Craigslist. Spaces that don’t optimize every interaction for engagement. Tools that respect user autonomy instead of trying to manipulate behavior. Websites that look ugly because making them pretty isn’t the point.
One Craigslist user summed it up: “When something is structured so simply and really does serve the community, and it doesn’t ask for much? That’s what survives”.
Maybe they’re right. Or maybe Craigslist is a relic from an internet that no longer exists, and its slow decline is inevitable. Either way, thirty years without fundamental changes is remarkable. Most websites from 1995 are long dead. The ones that survived, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, all changed dramatically, often multiple times.
Craigslist stayed the same. That’s either its genius or its fatal flaw. Probably both.
