On April 11, 2017, The Atlantic lauded KSL Classifieds for making Craigslist take a back seat in Utah.
The article reminisced about that golden time before online selling existed, before Craigslist was invented. We all paid real money to list our cars, old bed frames, and used cribs in the classifieds section of real print newspapers. (There are people alive on earth right now who don’t realize this was ever a thing.) Classified ads, or the money gleaned from them, is what kept print newspapers afloat.
As Craigslist became our default place to buy and sell used stuff online, newspapers collapsed nationwide. Utah is an island where things happened differently. Says the Atlantic:
In Salt Lake City, Craigslist is an afterthought. If you want to buy or sell a car or a cow or a hot tub in Salt Lake City or in one of the nearby towns in Utah, Wyoming, or Idaho, you go to a local website called KSL Classifieds, which takes its name from local television and radio stations owned by an arm of the Mormon Church.
Atlantic reporter Sarah Zhang actually interviewed several KSL posters — “a young mother selling 2,000 ounces of extra breast milk (‘I bought my wedding dress, my wedding ring on KSL—literally, we use it all the time—our couch and our TV’), a retiree who assembles and sells beehives as a hobby (‘I get more responses from KSL than Craigslist—quite a bit, probably three- or four-times more’), and a man selling eggs from his backyard chickens (re: Craigslist, ‘I don’t even know the concept. I don’t know how it works or anything).”
The Atlantic reporter sleuthed out the history of KSL Classifieds online and discovered the standard backroom closet office idea and skeptical executive. The software for the launch cost $800 at the time. The executive came up with it, but also predicted the whole thing would fail. It was Russell Banz who moved the idea forward and expected success, even though the ads would be free: Banz’s mantra was, “Heard it on KSL, saw it on KSL, got it on KSL.”
The free online classifieds were launched in 2000, right when paid classifieds were a real money-maker. Fortunately, Craigslist didn’t expand into Salt Lake City until 2004.
This doesn’t mean KSL’s online classifieds aren’t monetized. Receiving over 100 million page views a month (!), the site charges for commercial listings, charges extra to feature ads, and runs display ads right next to its classifieds ads.
The site is not explicitly geared toward Mormons, and it has plenty of non-Mormon users. But it steers clear of the more controversial categories that Craigslist is sometimes notorious for: personal ads, escort ads, and massage-services ads. In 2012, it also stopped selling guns.
