[philwelch]

> Why on earth would another newspaper print an ad or a classified that they're not being paid for?

It's kind of funny, isn't it? On the one hand we have the newspapers, who are being slowly killed off by the internet, and on the other hand we have internet startups like Padmapper who are doing things that are absolutely and plainly stupid when you imagine them being done by newspapers rather than web startups.

Here we have one company that allows free classified ads for almost everything, everywhere (Craigslist) on the one hand, and another company that scrapes free classified ads for rental housing and accepts no payment from anyone (Padmapper). Very strange.

FWIW, to me, Padmapper drives traffic to Craigslist rather than competing with it. Whether that traffic is valuable to Craigslist or not I can't say.