• Fortune, Monday, December 5, 2005 9:13 PM

Craigslist, the very popular and mostly free online classifieds site, has said it will begin charging New York real estate brokers for property listings as well as employers who post job listings in Boston, Washington D.C., San Diego, Calif., and Seattle. This means that Craigslist, which currently only charges employers for job listings in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, is about to make much more money. This year, analysts expect its revenue to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. Fortune takes an in-depth look at the financials of the company, reckoning that its total expenses are probably less than $5 million. Craigslist is probably making the move to offset the rising challenge from Google, which recently unveiled Google Base, a post-anything Web index that will be completely free for users, but company executives say their focus instead is on growing new projects.

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