Online classifieds are apparently becoming a popular undertaking just by looking at the explosion of web site Craigslist. The company was founded in 1995 and grew from a small email list of San Francisco events. Today the web site gets 20 billion page views per month, has over 120 million postings each month and has more than 50 million users in the United States alone. Now the site has an up and coming rival, backpage.com that may be able to give the online community a run for its money. Backpage is like Craigslist in that it lets users post ads for free about anything from yard sales to jobs. Backpage however, is a more locally focused online classified ad engine that targets specific metropolitan; the cities number over 250 and range from Akron, Ohio to Winston Salem, North Carolina. Unlike Craigslist the site also allow users to automatically repost ads after they expire and users can post an ad without creating an account.
After tooling around on Backpage I had to say the site’s interface seemed a whole lot easier to use as opposed to Craigslist; for example instead of getting to a particular ad for your locale of interest by clamoring through countries, states or cities a user can go straight to a city. When you click on a particular city (in my case it was Columbia, SC) you have all ad categories at your disposal. Backpage is a very clean and bare bones site and looks like it is off to a healthy start by looking at the number of affiliates it has. My main complaint would be that there are not as many ad listings as Craigslist but this may just be due to the fact that it is slightly under the radar of most online ad posters. Give Backpage a few years and I’m pretty sure we will see bigger and better things along the lines of Craigslist success.
