Greg Sterling wrote a great post (“What Are Classifieds Today?”) after an interview with Craig (our CEO) about how the word “classifieds” doesn’t really mean much to anyone. He used the example of Craigslist and Google — to their users, Craigslist isn’t a classifieds site and Google isn’t a search engine. They are “places” to “find stuff” and “find things,” respectively.

We found these exact results when we conducted a user study a little while back. After asking a cadre of long-term Craigslist users how they described the site, only one used the term “classifieds.” We’ll delve deeper into more results from this study in upcoming posts, but the lack of the term “classifieds” elucidates an interesting development in the market: while “classifieds” as a term is not being actively used, the classifieds category is expanding quickly.