The truth about craigslist.com
There’s been a lot of confusion about claims that syndication companies are making regarding craigslist. Now don’t get me wrong, I personally feel craigslist is a great tool to have in your syndication arsenal. IF you are willing to put the extra time into it.
You see, craigslist has a policy that nobody else is allowed to post your listings for you. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a quick excerpt from their terms of use:
8. POSTING AGENTS
A “Posting Agent” is a third-party agent, service, or intermediary that offers to post Content to the Service on behalf of others. To moderate demands on craigslist’s resources, you may not use a Posting Agent to post Content to the Service without express permission or license from craigslist. Correspondingly, Posting Agents are not permitted to post Content on behalf of others, to cause content to be so posted, or otherwise access the Service to facilitate posting Content on behalf of others, except with express permission or license from craigslist.
And also this:
[you agree not to]
y) use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the submission of postings on craigslist without each posting being manually entered by the author thereof (an “automated posting device”), including without limitation, the use of any such automated posting device to submit postings in bulk, or for automatic submission of postings at regular intervals.
The entire craigslist terms of use can be found here
Well to me this all seems pretty clear. You’re not playing by the rules unless you input your craigslist ad yourself. If someone tells you they can do it for you, please ask to see their express permission or license provided by craigslist.
Now there are services available that provide tools that assist you in the posting of craigslist ads, and these are obviously allowed. But really bothers me is that there are syndication services out there that make it look like they will post your listing to craigslist, when this isn’t the case at all. Some services advertise this “feature” when in reality they don’t do anything to help you, they just want to include the craigslist logo to help their marketing.
Do yourself and your clients a favor by not getting involved with a listings syndication service before you find out exactly what they have to offer you and exactly what it will cost you. You’ll be much better off in the long run my doing your due diligence and making an informed decision.
-John