Henry Blodget estimated yesterday that Craigslist could be worth as much as $5 billion. While the number could be accurate, Craigslist’s plans for monetization, which involves charging more people to post their ads, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

JohnnyC’s comment on Blodget’s story proved to be spot-on: “Free is the future of online classifieds. We have seen this with every major booming classified site in the world.”

Classifieds absolutely need to be free, but that doesn’t mean you can’t generate great revenue. As with all other forms of online advertising, you pay for increased visibility. But the fact of the matter remains that free is a proven business model, and will carry on well into the next stages of the Internet while pay-per-post revenue models will slowly dwindle away.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Classifieds.