We’ve been playing games with a free service.

At the end of September, we joked internally about the changes coming to Craigslist. We didn’t actually know what they were going to be, only that they were coming. October is the Craigslist month of doom. Last year it was the Great Ghosting Ruckus that caused leads to vanish into a black hole of ads. Our leads dropped by half. This year, Craig and his team worked hard on finding new ways to take their service back from us freeloaders.

Surprised about the Craigslist changes? Don’t be

Truth is, none of us should have been surprised. Over the years, we’ve violated the Craigslist Terms of Service like Miley violated our sense of decency. We’ve done it to improve our vacancy. Miley did it to sell records. Some will claim to have behaved while posting, but most of us posted too often, used posting tools, regurgitated the same content, used too many capital letters, and linked to external contact forms. We’ve been naughty.

And so the sledgehammer dropped, again. What makes this year’s round of face slapping more difficult is we are still reeling from Google taking away our ability to track keywords. In the office, when asked for an answer to a question, lately I’ve been responding with Not Providing. We slyly thought our posting tools wouldn’t let us down too. We can still track our ad views on Craigslist there Mr. Google! … until we couldn’t.

Here’s the latest of what Mr. Craig and the Gang have taken away, this time around:

External links are dead

You can no longer post live links to your website or external contact forms. You can include a link but you will not be able to click on it. With some verbiage (Don’t forget to Copy and Paste for more info!) you can still nudge people to do a call for action. It’s uglier though and mobile people will probably be more reluctant to do it. You ever try copying and pasting on an iPad? It’s annoying.

UPDATE 11/9/2013 -  It looks as though live links might be back. This is good news. I think they realized that these external links help themselves as well by building more link relevance. Hopefully they stick around.

UPDATE 11/11/2013 - Live linking is gone again. The Great Live Linking Tennis Match continues. Hopefully they change it back soon.

No more external images

The days of the template are gone. Sorry everyone but those beautiful yellow banners with brown backgrounds and purple fonts that you have cherished have been replaced by white backgrounds and black text. Mr. Craig has removed your ability to include that fancy HTML code which could transform your post into something beautiful (Another good question is this: Is calling a Craigslist ad beautiful an oxymoron? Another blog post maybe). One workaround I have seen is to convert your pretty templated ad into an image and upload that to Craigslist. Not the best solution but better than boring.

View tracking is gone

The biggest thing posting tools have always helped with is your ability to find out if an ad has worked. Was the title effective? Is posting at 4pm better than posting at 11am? Right now, it’s impossible to embed any tracking code into an ad because it gets stripped. And that’s not a Miley reference. What this means is you can no longer determine if your ad has been viewed. Except when your phone rings and they say “That Ad on Craigslist”. Then you’ll know.

Are posting tools worth the money now?

As we continue to fork out over $40 a month to companies for tools to help us post to a free site, we need to stop a minute and really think. Is that money still worth it? The once meaningful analytics have been reduced to showing the number of ads posted a day. You cannot use their pretty templates anymore. It’s been proven that you get punished by Craigslist for using tools. Should we pay for half the services we’ve been accustomed to? Is there still some serious value for our money?

I’ll let you decide. As for me, these tools do give us the ability to make sure properties are posting and when. They are still good content curators, which can help keep people from re-posting the same things. Some give best practices for posting and recommendations for better ads.

I would love to hear how these changes have affected you. What are you doing differently? Has this changed how you are looking at Craigslist for lead generation? Do you look at Teddy Bears differently? (I do)

Happy renting everyone.