Top advantages of using Craigslist for casual encounters

Four cons from a straight male perspective.

The First feature: It's often ful of bots who sometimes write very realistic-looking profiles in order to get you to engage in an email exchange. At the end of the exchange the other "person" sends you some weak-ass message like, "Oh I'm very nervous about meeting in person, please go to this simple link and get verified so I know you are real human and not a maniac."

The Second feature: Sometimes takes half an hour or more for a message to appear on the website.The listing page is updated by CL every 15 minutes, so they say. You can refresh the post page once a minute, finally see a new members listing, and find out according to the time stamp on the listing that it was posted 45 minutes ago.

The Third feature: I can't tell you how many times I've noticed an ad that looks good until you get to the part where it says something like, "Must be very well hung, sorry no one under 10 inches considered. There are a lot of unrealistic expectations."

The Fourth feature (the most obvious one): If you are a real man seeking a woman (m4w), you stand almost no chance of being seen. That is the truth. That listing page is completely packed. At the top of the page it tells you how many ads there are for each category.To give you an idea, I just now took a look at the listings pages for my area. On the w4m page (women seeking men), it says, "1-100 of 250". On the m4w page (men seeking women), it says "1-100 of 6251". In other words, 250 women seeking men, and 6251 men seeking women. And of the 250 women seeking men, a huge number of them are fake personals - bots (see point one).

Is Craigslist absolutely free?

Craigslist was one of those webplatforms which started out free and more recently introduced paid posibilities.
One of the main reasons is done such way is to attract more personals to use the webplatform in question. But many social media platforms which become big start out free and once they have grown sufficiently then they start charging. In this case we are talking about a job board and a place where people could post about used items they had for sale.

Another big reason why many products start out free and remain free is to collect customer personal data. The info is valuable to advertisers and banks which buy it for a decent change of cash. Among the reasons it works so well is because during the time the platform is free. More people are willing to backlink which results in big ranking boosts.

And knowing how to use such a platforms like Craigslist while these are free is a great way to make a business proccess on the internet. In fact, AirBNB is the largest web service for searching hotel or hostel with no real state because they found a way to automate the process of posting on craigslist while it was still free.