Craigslist.org has been a popular website for the past few years, but I often wonder how many people in Des Moines know about the site, and how many actually use it.  The actual address is a sub-domain of the main site, and can be found at http://desmoines.craigslist.org/.  Craigslist began in San Francisco in 1995 (by Craig Newmark) and today offers free classified ads for apartments, personals, jobs, general merchandise, business services, and more - to more than 400 cities worldwide.

Yahoo reports about 800 searches during January 2007 for phrases related to “craigslist des moines”.  MSN reports around 350 similar searches per month in May and June, so it seems a lot of people are trying to find the site…and when you include all the people who have the URL saved, or type the address directly - it seems to be quite popular.

I went to the site today and found more than 8,000 items available in the “for sale” category.  A closer look as this category (which includes subsections such as furniture, cars, tickets, jewelry and computers) revealed that about 15% of the listings were for cars and trucks, with furniture items accounting for about 9%.  Browsing through the postings was very addictive and I estimate that 80-90% of the listings were local (it’s not uncommon to find ads from all over the country, even though it is supposed to focus on central Iowa).

I have used the Des Moines IA Craigslist site to post job openings, and I also found a customer there (he was looking for help with search engine optimization-seo).  I talked with another person in our office who uses the site every week, and she has nearly furnished her home with the treasures found on the site.  So how about you?  Tell me how you use Craigslist?

Popularity: 6% [?]