There was a major shakeup late last year with Craigslist when they started charging car dealers $5 per post. Many who had been using the service directly or paying someone else to post on their behalf abandoned the platform due to the added expense. In retrospect, it was a great thing for everyone involved – for Craigslist, for consumers, and even for car dealers who stayed with it.

The numbers are clear and resounding, but let’s first discuss the logic behind this “bad news becoming good news” for car dealers. When the classified ad website started taking off in the automotive industry around seven years ago, it was the best kept secret in sales. Consumers loved the hybrid aspect that made it a little like Autotrader and a little like the classified sections of newspapers. It presented things chronologically and properly mixed dealers, brokers, and individual owners within their listings.

A handful of companies realized that the website offered value for dealers but that it was more tedious than using inventory websites that were able to pull from the DMS. They started offering Craigslist posting services that not only automated the process for dealers but that also (usually) presented the individual vehicles in a better way than trying to manually post them one vehicle at a time.

Business was booming. Craigslist took note and decided that the time was right to get their chunk of the budgets, so they imposed their fee. There was an exodus that followed that put some of the smaller companies offering the service in danger. Many dealers that relied on Craigslist to sell cars every month did not want to allocate the resources necessary to keep posting so they abandoned the platform altogether.

It is in this exodus that the value of Craigslist inventory posting really took off. Though few would admit it, the medium was reaching a saturation point in 2013. As more dealers got on board with using the medium, we saw an increase in the number of posts every day that was disproportionate to the number of additional car shoppers on the website. It was possible to have inventory posted one day get pushed so far down the list due to the flood of new posts that they became virtually invisible within a day or two.

Today, thanks to the additional cost to post, the dubious art of “spamming Craigslist” has been reduced dramatically. With fewer cars getting posted every day, the visibility of each individual post from a dealer is raised.

In essence, when Craigslist started charging for car dealers to post inventory, they cleaned up the feed to the point that it became worth it for car dealers to pay to post inventory. As strange as it may sound, there is a higher return on investment by paying $5 for today’s model than there was when it was free. That’s not fuzzy math. “Free” was never really free. Whether a dealership was paying for a service to post for them or if they were investing time into posting their inventory on their own, “free” was costing them more per car sold than they pay with today’s model.

The field is more open. The posts get much more exposure. The spam has been removed, bringing greater value to the consumers. Aggressive dealers that want to reach a more exclusive audience of buyers should invest a portion of their advertising budget to Craigslist. Before, it was a good website upon which to post. Today, it’s an essential, particularly for those dealers that rely on pre-owned sales to drive their revenue.

Once again, Craigslist is the best kept secret in automotive advertising, not because dealers don’t know about it, but because they don’t realize the amazing ROI potential that the paid model has opened up for them.