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Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Craigslist's secret sauce: Smut

By | April 5, 2007, 3:00pm PDT

Summary: Craigslist has 17 million people visiting its site a month, but many of them are there for a little more that apartment rentals, concert tickets and miscellaneous junk. Compete's Stephen Bagg shows that erotic services more than doubles the next category in terms of individual visitors. New York and Los Angeles have the most unique [...]

Craigslist has 17 million people visiting its site a month, but many of them are there for a little more that apartment rentals, concert tickets and miscellaneous junk.

Compete's Stephen Bagg shows that erotic services more than doubles the next category in terms of individual visitors. New York and Los Angeles have the most unique visitors trolling for erotic services. Cars for sale is the category that's typically a distant second–except for New York where "casual encounters" is second.

Bagg goes deeper into the stats to find that men seeking men are the power group in Craigslist.

Writes Bagg:

"A deeper look into the metrics reveals a real power group behind Craigslist’s impressive numbers: men seeking men. Even though they only enjoy Top 5 status in two cities by visitor volume, each month these Craigslist constituents view over 50% more pages and 20 more minutes on average searching these posts than any others – from apartment rentals to items for baby."

And you thought Craigslist was popular because of its delightfully communist leanings.

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Topics

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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Free Sex has been around alot longer than Craigs List.
dlake9 11th Apr 2007
It doesn't matter where it is any sexual content at all upsets the "Cristian" Moral magority. It can be on T.V. or in the Newyork Best Seller List it doesn't matter. They will cause a fuss regardless. But it would help if there wasn't any ammo for them.
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duh
richvball44 6th Apr 2007
thats a given. sex sells
0 Votes
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They will fly at this like a moth to a flame.

Its a free personals.. course you have to know the terminalogy.
It doesn't matter where it is any sexual content at all upsets the "Cristian" Moral magority. It can be on T.V. or in the Newyork Best Seller List it doesn't matter. They will cause a fuss regardless. But it would help if there wasn't any ammo for them.

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