Craigslist Shuts Down Its Adult Services Section

Craigslist Shuts Down Its Adult Services Section

So finally, this happened. Craigslist, one of the top advertising web sites, has officially closed down the adult services section. It's a bit surprising that they didn't put up a fight longer, but it looks like they are having a brand new category where ads are properly screened and will cost up to $10 per post. That's probably a smart move on by Craigslist considering the magnitude of attention that it got recently in Wired CNN and other sources. They should be able to make up for this loss with their new version of censored ads where each ad will be manually reviewed.

The adult ads topic was a problem for politicians in United States because of human trafficking and misuse of this part of Craigslist. There have been a few incidents that also gave Craigslist a bad reputation. The killing of a service provider, Julissa Brisman in August of 2009, who posted ads in Craigslist has also raised some concern. Craigslist first removes this section in United States in September 2010 and now they've wiped anything adult related from their site globally. "Craigslist is anxious to know that the perpetrators in these girls' cases are behind bars." Said Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster.

The question remains, is this really helping or making things worse for service providers who were using Craigslist? Where are those people going to go now?

It's unlikely that this has solved any problem of crime. It's not going to end the career of all those who were using Craigslist. Ads are going to continue appearing on Internet and people will always find ways around this. Objective to disperse attention from Craigslist is probably accomplished to some degree. Also, having some control will work out on lawmakers' benefit.

The day Craigslist closed its adult services section there was a noticeable increase in traffic in many sites offering similar ad services. Among them were backpage.org and rateyourescort.org. Backpage charges from $1 up to $10 for bigger cities, while RateYourEscort is still free. These are some sites that still allow a diversity of ads where anything goes. This is why Craigslist was favoured over many other web sites, which don't give service providers enough control over who can post and where they can post.

Craigslist was cheap. For many cities it was free, convenient and had a pretty good screening process which required that all posts are done with a validated phone number. Maybe this did not meet the expectations of lawmakers, but it's often more advanced than in other web sites.

There are plenty of other directories, agency web sites and forums that can be used for the same purpose by hobbyists and service providers. They are essentially doing the same thing. But Craigslist was well known for its convenience and popularity.

Now there are different challenges. All of the sudden there is a plethora of new problems which, one would think won't really help to ease crime. Personal information and photos will be floating around internet with little to no screening of these posts. Ads will go back to local alternative papers, and who knows, more trading will happen on the streets?

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