craigslist austin has an annual fee of $25 for posting Help-wanted ads.

Craigslist Austin a well-known online platform for free classified ads, is proposing an additional fee of $25 for posting an open position on its job listings page for Sacramento and three other metropolitan regions.

The company, based in San Francisco, currently charges fees in seven of the 450 cities with Web sites, According to Jim Buckmaster, president, and chief executive officer of Craigslist.

The company, founded in 1998, first imposed the fee of $25 on residents of San Francisco in 1998, and it added the fee to Los Angeles and New York in 2004. The company has added fees in Boston, San Diego, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The fee has increased to $85 in San Francisco and remains $25 in the other six cities.

Craigslist Austin proposes charging $25 to companies looking for employees located in Sacramento, Orange County, Chicago, and Portland, Ore. Other classified ads from the company will remain unaffected, including accommodation, goods, services, and even events.

The Sacramento site was launched in October 2000, and it is one of the most popular websites. Sacramento is 13th on the list of the number of page visits. Buckmaster said that Sacramento is sixth in the rankings based on page views per head.

Craigslist suggested the fee after receiving inquiries from users concerned about the quality advertisements for jobs on one particular website.

“A big part of it is when we start hearing complaints from users and requests that a fee is considered,” Buckmaster stated.

He also said that get-rich-quick programs, multilevel marketing, and “various things that look like job postings but aren’t” are not typically found on job boards on websites that charge fees.

Since the company began charging for job advertisements in other cities, officials from the company have been hearing from customers that those with paid job boards work better for both job seekers and employers. When the fees were introduced, the number of job advertisements dropped dramatically at first. However, they quickly increased, tripling and doubling according to craigslist.

The free service comes with a few drawbacks, Buckmaster said. If it’s free, employers will be inclined to put ads up in a myriad of categories, making it harder for job-seekers, Buckmaster stated.

The fee can also cut down on the requirement of employers to republish job advertisements, the company explained. Ads are classified according to their filed date, with the most recent ads at the top. Therefore, the more advertisements are received, the more ads are pushed further down the list, prompting employers to take down advertisements.

Additionally, a fee of $25 is only a fraction one-tenth or less of the fees that job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder are charging “even though the exposure arguably is greater,” Buckmaster stated. The McClatchy Co., the newspaper publisher for The Sacramento Bee and 30 other daily newspapers, is also a partner in CareerBuilder.

THE NEWSPAPER PERSPECTIVE

Newspapers typically charge higher rates for classified ads. They have lost money to online advertisers due to these ads.

The Sacramento-based McClatchy McClatchy, for instance, McClatchy, a newspaper based in Sacramento, is experiencing declines in ad revenue, which makes up 85 percent of the newspaper’s total revenue. Classified advertising accounts for around 30 percent of McClatchy’s revenue.

Documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that McClatchy’s advertising classified, including advertising for jobs, fell from the third quarter of 2006. Without considering the company’s acquisition in the year 2000 from twenty Knight-Ridder publications, the number of classified ads declined by $23 million, about 11 percent, from the beginning of 2006’s first quarter to the initial three months. In the same way, revenue from job ads decreased by $6 million, about 8 percent.

RECOMMENDED

HEALTH CARE

Moderna dismisses the CFO of the future after just one day.

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

Family offers 19,500 acres for sale in the bustling industry corridor.

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

Here’s what will be the plan for the Four Seasons look like

Buckmaster stated that newspapers would prefer that craigslist austin higher fees, considering that it’s challenging to be competitive with the free service. He couldn’t imagine how craigslist’s plan to charge a fee for job postings could hurt newspapers since they’re more focused on employers who can afford higher costs.

“Newspapers, as far as job postings, have been hurt more, in our view, by companies like Monster who are kind of ferociously competitive for Fortune 500 companies,” which pay between $500 to $1,000 range for ads, the ad said.

Ellen Hume, a media analyst at the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Massachusetts, stated in an email that craigslist austindid a “brilliant” job of positioning itself as a completely free alternative to classified ads in newspapers.

The possibility of charging a fee could help craigslist’s standing in the market for media since it’s now the usual site for a variety of companies or job applicants, she explained. Most classified ads, excluding jobs, are entirely free on Craigslist.

Hume stated that Craigslist would continue to be more appealing than newspaper classifieds despite employment prices.

“So craigslist probably will still eat the newspapers’ lunch even as it charges, as they do, for the same services,” she stated.

JOB SEEKERS SPEAK UP

Suppose craigslist is ever asked to charge an advertising fee for jobs. In that case, the company has a discussion forum on a specific website to solicit user feedback.

Forums for discussion have been online for one year and, in some cases, three years before company officials reviewed the feedback and taken an informed decision on establishing a cost, Buckmaster said.

Sacramento’s discussion boards went into operation in March.

Recently, Mark Ryan Pavlicek of Portland participated in the discussion and said that fees could hurt small-scale businesses.

“I can understand the value of having a fee for those of us seeking higher-salaried jobs run by corporations, but there are a lot of people who work service industry, retail or customer service-related positions that rely on craigslist for employment,” the writer published on his blog on May 29. “Many of the smaller businesses … will be deterred from posting on craigslist austin because they will not want to pay the fee. “

While Buckmaster stated that mom-and-pop stores are more likely to display an advertisement for help in the windows rather than posting an advertisement on the internet, Pavlicek reached in Portland and said those who are actively looking for work tend to go for jobs on craigslist austinthan rely on finding a sign on the storefront windows.

However, according to Buckmaster, Small employers typically consider it a fair tradeoff in not having their official job ads surrounded by advertisements that aren’t legitimate.

“We have a sense that small employers don’t find a fee burdensome,” he added.

Kelly Arbor of Auburn is searching for employment in education. She was adamant about the fee of $25 and said that she wasn’t concerned that it could hurt employment opportunities.

“I think Sacramento is robust enough,” she added. “There’s a lot of very good, legitimate postings. I think that most people who are looking for an employee are willing to pay $25. “

Arbor believes that the fee will reduce fraudulent artists who mess up the job board.

“Craigslist is kind of like the wild, wild West,” she stated. “I think that those of us who use it on a regular basis would like it to be a little more civilized. … I think it’s gotten a bad reputation in some respects. “

Dave Cox, a recruiter at GraphXStaff in Sacramento, likes the rates.

“It might not be the popular opinion among recruiters, but I agree with the fee,” he added. He added that it would eliminate all the “crap.” He is not a fan of some who post comments on the discussion boards that claim the fees will assist employers in finding qualified workers. He thinks he’ll continue to find plenty of candidates who aren’t qualified. However, he added that it could aid job seekers as they’d have fewer advertisements to filter through.

If Craigslist costs $25 per post, Cox added that he’s looking to guarantee that the advertisement will remain in place for a minimum of 30 days. He added that Craigslist ads are susceptible to getting “flagged” by other users and removed. According to him, in a competitive market, the competition is likely to flag legitimate ads.

While Hilary Thompson of Santa Cruz is seeking an employment opportunity for a nonprofit organization in Sacramento and is worried that the costs are too high for nonprofit organizations.

“I think that (the fees) are good in a sense because they’ll stop a lot of the spamming that’s going on and the fake ads,” Thompson stated. “But I think they should look at the marketplace of the city and provide some kind of discounts for nonprofits. “

The company claims that craigslist austin can receive more than 12 million classified ads every month and more than 750,000 new jobs listings per month.