Slowly but surely, Craigslist is adding fees to its job listings. This article points out that the next cities on the list are: Sacramento, Orange County, Chicago and Portland, Oregon.

Craigslist, a popular online network of free classified advertisements, has proposed a $25 fee to post an opening on its job postings page in Sacramento and three other metropolitan areas.
The 12-year-old company first charged a $25 fee in San Francisco in 1998, adding the fee in Los Angeles and New York in 2004. It has since added the fee in Boston, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The fee has climbed to $75 in San Francisco and remains $25 in the other six cities.

The Sacramento site first launched in October 2000 and is among the company's busiest sites. Sacramento ranks 13th by number of page views. The city ranks sixth based on page views per capita, Buckmaster said.

In each case, craigslist proposed the fee after receiving requests from users who were concerned about the quality of some of the job ads on a particular site, he said.

"A big part of it is when we start hearing complaints from users and requests that a fee be considered," Buckmaster said.

Get-rich-quick schemes, multilevel marketing and "various things that look like job postings but really aren't" are mostly absent from job boards on sites with a fee, he said.

Since craigslist started charging for job postings in other cities, company officials say they consistently hear that the paid job boards are more useful for employers and job-seekers. In each case when fees were instituted, job ads dropped significantly initially, but the volume quickly rebounded, doubling and in some cases tripling, according to craigslist.

One can only expect fees for job listings to extend to many other cities over the next few years. The allure of $$$ is just too great for any online classified site.

Labels: Job boards