As part of Craigslist’s evolving efforts to crack down on fake ads and “e-whoring”, Craigslist is now using GEO-IP detection for its ads. It used to allow people from outside a particular city to post ads for that city. Eg. someone who lives in Seattle could post ads in Washington DC. That’s all changed now. Your IP must reflect the location you are posting to.

I am not sure how effective this would be in the long run. Craigslist is so lucrative for blackhat marketers that they have successfully bypassed previous antispam efforts. Even Craigslist’s lawsuit against one of the biggest CL ad posting software companies don’t deter other apps from popping up to take its place. Here’s a quick history based on a historical observation of craigslist’s ad volume/section activity (NOTE: we don’t condone any of the behaviors discussed in this entry. This is purely for news commentary purposes only.)

Antispam measure: community flagging of ‘suspect’ ads Workaround: post tons of ads to compensate for the kill rate.

Antispam measure: autoghosting of ads Workaround: posts tons of ads to compensate for the ghost rate.

Antispam measure: Phone verified accounts Workaround: Spammers would place free ads on other sites that trick people inito phone verifying accounts. They then turnaround and sell these in bulk to other CL posters.

It is an evolutionary arms race. Similar to how predator and prey evolve in the natural world. The prey would evolve a defense, the predator evolves to defeat that defense. Never-ending.

Due to pressure from state attorney generals regarding the usage of Craigslist’s “erotic services” section, CL has decided to drop erotic services and replace it with a new “adult services” section.  What is disturbing about the new section is that it will be manually filtered by CL employees.  Is this a preview of ad censorship?  Not like it’s very easy to post on CL nowadays: you need a PVA (phone verified account) and your ad has to make it through many, increasingly it seems, arbitrary barriers.  As I’ve always maintained, Classified Ads sites owe most of their success to advertisers/posters and this new development (and its implications for future editorial control) would probably dampen posters’ appetities.

If anything, this is good news for CL competitors.  For a great classified ads automated poster, click here

More information on this development here