One year since Craig's list auto ads ceased to be free

[TJ Hopland]

Its been about a year since Craig's List started charging for car and truck ads.  For those that regularly look through the ads then and now what are you seeing?  Which types of cars do you look at?   

My opinion is there are still a reasonable number of decent classics for sale.   The biggest reduction I see is in what the news paper used to call the 'thrifties'.  There are hardly any $500-1000 cars anymore.  Some of those were junk while others were repairable or parts cars.  I kinda miss those.  Not that I bought many of them but I liked to see what was out there.   

Surprisingly there didn't seem to be a reduction in 'dealer' ads.  They still seem to be pretty well spamming with multiple posts of the same car and a million key words screwing up the searches.  I would guess those dealers have to be pretty decent income for the site so their plan must be working?   

[FiftySix]

I think most people use Facebook Marketplace now. That's where I like to binge-browse cars.

[Big Apple Caddy]

Surprisingly there didn't seem to be a reduction in 'dealer' ads.  They still seem to be pretty well spamming with multiple posts of the same car and a million key words screwing up the searches.  I would guess those dealers have to be pretty decent income for the site so their plan must be working?

Although private party car ads stopped being free a year ago, Craigslist started charging for dealer ads back in 2013 which led some dealers to try to sneak free ads in the "by owner" section.  I think that may have been a reason CL decided to charge for all car ads.

[TJ Hopland]

Interesting.  I didn't know that they had been charging for dealer ads before. 

Has facebook marketplace improved in the last year?   Seems like I remember people saying it was far from ideal to search especially for something like a car.   

[Big Apple Caddy]

I think FB Marketplace is comparable to other car ad sites in that you can search using multiple criteria e.g., year, make, model, mileage, price, keywords, etc.

[cadillac ken]

I've been visiting CL (cars for sale:1925 -- 1970 in Florida) pretty much every morning with my coffee for years now.  Most cars posted in the year range I look at are not very affordable and IMO, are mostly 2 to 3 times what they will ever sell for.  I see cars that have been listed there for the same price for literally months and months and they still have not sold.  Overall I don't see many cars being sold that I can tell judging by the number of times they are relisted.  And to my surprise-- always for the same overly optimistic price.

The nominal charge of $5 does not seem to have effected much in terms of listings or prices from what I can see.

[TJ Hopland]

Do you need some sort of account to do marketplace?  Then do you correspond through some sort of private message thing?   I really don' know anything about FB other than any time I am forced to try and get info from there I get tons of popups and usually can't get what I need so I have to ask someone else to get me the website or phone number I'm looking for. 

[Big Apple Caddy]

Searching and browsing Marketplace ads can be done easily without a FB account but while dealer ads display name and contact information, private party ads typically don't (occasionally PP ads will list phone number in description) and require FB account to contact seller.