Greg's Corner

Bashing the competition

Recently, an article from MakeUseOf was brought to our attention. The article, written by Saikat Basu, was another one of these ‘top alternatives to craigslist’ and Geebo was listed as one of the choices. Mr. Basu says some very complimentary things about Geebo including referring to Geebo as an industry veteran and that Geebo has a more personal atmosphere than the competition. On that we can agree, however, Mr. Basu also says a couple of things that we feel the need to take issue with.

The first item is that Mr. Basu states that the Geebo blog spends a lot of time bashing our competition for their sketchy practices. That is only half-true. We admit, that we do criticize some of our competition as often they are hypocritical in defense of their platforms. We’ve also criticized companies outside of our industry if we feel that they are misleading the public or violating the public’s trust. Conversely, we’ve also applauded companies and even competitors that we felt have been deserving of our praise.

The second item we’d like to address is the statement by Mr. Basu where he claims that Geebo is no safer than any other online classifieds site. We’d like to remind not only Mr. Basu but our readers and customers that we manually review each and every listing that is posted to Geebo. That in itself cuts down on a multitude of scams and illegal activity that most other platforms are plagued by. Geebo has never taken listings for ads that can be construed as being for prostitution and even eliminated our personals section for fear of it being used for human trafficking. We’re constantly rejecting listings for illicit drugs. We even stopped accepting listings for pets to the potential of abuse from puppy mills and other instance of animal cruelty. We stopped accepting ads for firearms even though no firearms-related crimes have ever been linked to Geebo. Most recently, we started monitoring responses to ad owners through the Geebo platform in order to weed out overseas scammers. Lastly, in the almost two decades that Geebo has been in business, there has never been a reported incident of robbery, rape, assault, fraud, or murder linked to Geebo. Unfortunately, not many of our competitors take the same care for their customers as we do ours.

While we appreciate the kind words Mr. Basu has had for us, we’d like to invite not only Mr. Basu but the users of other platforms to get to know Geebo a little better and see how proud we are of our safety records and initiatives.