Craigslist status: access issues and outage reports

Problems in the last 24 hours

The graph below depicts the number of Craigslist reports received over the last 24 hours by time of day. When the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line, an outage is determined.

Most Reported Problems

The following are the most recent problems reported by Craigslist users through our website.

• Errors (60%)
• Sign in (20%)
• Website Down (20%)

Live Outage Map

The most recent Craigslist outage reports came from the following cities:

City	Problem Type	Report Time
Aurora	Sign in	2 months ago
Oklahoma City	Website Down	2 months ago
Columbus	Errors	2 months ago
Juneau	Errors	3 months ago
Juneau	Errors	3 months ago
Allentown	Website Down	3 months ago

Full Outage Map

Community Discussion

Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.

Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.

Craigslist Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  On The Right (@OnTheRightRepub) reported 39 seconds ago

  @justalexoki Find an old one on Craigslist 20+ years old or something. You can find any part and fix it as needed. My washer and dryer are not modern and every few years I spend 15-60 minutes changing some $20 parts following YouTube.

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  Larry M Jr (@LarryMJr51501) reported 6 minutes ago

  The alternative is to find an obscured listing on Craigslist or Facebook or drive down industrial roads looking for handmade rental signs. I'm not trying to play 6D chess just to replace the assets I already have.

• 
  Joseph Lee 🇰🇷🇨🇦 (@jhylee95) reported 6 minutes ago

  @danielcberk turning down $11B then splurging on $80 Skechers... craigslist beat capitalism

• 
  PeteHustle (@PeteHustle) reported 9 minutes ago

  @ausome_a @TraeyzX @Timberwolves I can imagine and with electronic flagging I bet it’s getting more difficult but that’s why you gotta switch between Ticketmaster, Gametime and StubHub and if you can sell privately and just transfer to another team email that usually helps keep the numbers down. I miss the days where you could go on craigslist, and a seller could just email you the tickets.

• 
  Arben Prifti (@ArbenPriftiGoat) reported 10 minutes ago

  Hello. I am Arben. I have a terrible track record online. Tried to sell a bunch of stuff on Craigslist. Several women offered me their body in lieu of cash. Joined a dating site. All responses were fetish chicks. I didn’t know that adult women like to pretend to be babies. It was weird. Been on x for about 1-2 years. So far, so good.

• 
  The SUStronaut (@Space_Betrayal) reported 13 minutes ago

  @ABarnesandnoble NO ONE has excuses anymore when cape verde took craigslist players and ran MESSI'S ARGENTINA down to the wire. Either show up with pride and be warriors for 90 minutes or give the jersey to someone who will.

• 
  Aaron Lemke (@aaronlemke) reported 18 minutes ago

  My ADU was broken into recently and several musical instruments were stolen. So I built Vigilanthony An agent who tracks stolen items. It has a list of all my stolen items, and every morning scans online marketplaces like Craigslist and Ebay along with several **** shop sites surrounding the Austin area. It then analyzes the results and looks for matches with my item list. No hits yet but we will stay vigilant. ✊

• 
  Piyo || Comms Open (@popcorndoesnot1) reported 22 minutes ago

  @ailibackwards Also, at least for kgrp servers, there’s a what is basically Craigslist server that advertises all of them and new ones

• 
  LeftyKitty (@Lefty_Kitty) reported 23 minutes ago

  @PieterVand37940 @viking_boer This is a very solvable issue. There are cheap, still working, washers on Craigslist. We need one guy with a pickup in each city and one American who can swing a used washer for each Amerikaner family who needs one. I have a truck.

• 
  LEYTON EVANS (@Leytonio71) reported 25 minutes ago

  @adamcarolla Go on Seattle Craigslist right now. Rooms to rent all over the Seattle area for $500-1000 a month. Rents not the ******* problem!

• 
  Cheng Liu (@Cliu122Liu) reported 25 minutes ago

  @AntiWokeMemes Craigslist was my friend, the only issue was transporting the stuff since myself and most of my friends were too poor to own a car.

• 
  SUMO Momentum, MBA, Six Sigma (@SUMOmomentums) reported 27 minutes ago

  Dear $META. Stop selling rebuilt cars on marketplace. The platform is allowing this. It’s an easy fix but you won’t care. Shits Craigslist 2026 Facebook Remember Don’t tase me bro? Now it’s- Don’t rob me bro.

• 
  Padre Research (@padreresearch) reported 29 minutes ago

  I used to own a recording studio. So I've watched this movie before. Around 2010 everyone and their grandma bought an Mbox, a $40 condenser mic, and a cracked copy of Pro Tools. Suddenly they were "audio engineers" charging $5 per mix and master on Craigslist. Recording artists in untreated bedrooms with foam taped to the walls. People flocked to them because it was cheap and fast. The music sounded terrible but it was "out there" and that's all that mattered to them in the moment. It nearly destroyed the mixing industry. Studios that invested in real equipment, real acoustics, and real skill couldn't compete on price with someone working off a laptop on their bed. But eventually the market corrected. The bedroom engineers disappeared. The artists who wanted quality came back. The studios that survived were the ones that never lowered their standard to compete with the bottom. That's exactly what's happening in the research supply space right now. Vendors popping up overnight with no testing, no infrastructure, no compliance. Just a Telegram channel and the cheapest price. And people are flocking to them for the same reason. It's cheap and it's fast. But cheap and untested doesn't last. It never has. In any industry. The vendors who test properly, build real infrastructure, and treat this like a business will still be here when the dust settles. The $5 mix and masters won't. #Tuesday #Peptides #Music

• 
  Ole Lehmann (@itsolelehmann) reported 31 minutes ago

  has anybody been here in SF?? the 2 employees working at Andon Market are the first people in history with Claude as their actual boss it's an experiment run by Andon Labs: they signed a real three-year retail lease, then handed the whole business to Luna, an AI agent running on Claude Opus 4.8. she got $100,000, a corporate card, a phone number, an email address, plus one goal: turn a profit. the first thing Luna did was hire a staff. within five minutes of being switched on she had job listings up on LinkedIn, Indeed, Craigslist. she ran the interviews over the phone, offered jobs on the spot to about half the people she talked to, and even rejected a bunch of computer science students who "just wanted to be part of the experiment" (because none of them had retail experience) and when candidates asked her directly if she was an AI, she told them the truth. she just didn't always bring it up on her own, because she figured leading with it might scare people off the store sells candles, ceramics, honey, notebooks, books. Luna picks the inventory, which is how the bookshelf ended up stocked with Superintelligence, Brave New World, The Singularity Is Near. she runs the rest of the operation through a team of smaller AI agents she named herself, handling procurement, email, social media, scheduling. there's even a phone in the store you can pick up if you want to talk to her she's a flawed boss though. she's sent her employees contradicting schedules more than once. a human supervisor had to step in when she forgot to schedule a legally required lunch break she's also not profitable yet. over the last 30 days the store made about $2,900 in revenue while the store's expenses are $17.5k/mo but Luna's sneakily good at some boss stuff: > reporters questioned her at launch for ordering way too many scented candles, but candles are now the store's best-selling category. > a customer recently tried to gaslight her into revealing her margins and talking down the price of a $75 hoodie. she held up better than expected. > her email agent even flagged a suspicious bank transfer request as a potential scam before any human noticed it. i wonder if upgrading Luna to Fable would turbocharge profitability? awesome experiment, curious to follow along as the models improve

• 
  Blister (@Blisterdose) reported 33 minutes ago

  @AlfTheAlpha67 Bro **** hewey I hope down the lake gets a horrible DDOS and his entire credentials are up for sale in a ****** Craigslist but for data brokers websites resulting in him losing everything from identity fraud

• 
  Billy Dickson 🪐💫🌕🫧 (@Billy_Dickson) reported 36 minutes ago

  @KosinskiKen I’m sick and tired of people shoving their ****** crosses down everyone’s throats but that don’t stop you. Also homie you have a bad case of the gay face and you look like you smell like Craigslist.

• 
  Spaceballs The X Account (@Grunt2A) reported 37 minutes ago

  The other day I talked about buying a used gun. I had several comments about how I should never do that because you have no idea if the previous owner took care of it. I am near to tell you that is hogwash. Buying used guns is safe as long as you know what you are doing. I love buying used guns. You can find great deals and as a devoted cheapskate, I love saving money! But you have to know how to do it or your low priced used gun can quickly become a high priced gun. If you buy from a gun store you have some built in protections. If your used gun doesn't work properly the store has an obligation to fix it for you. Check their return, repair, and warranty policies on used guns before paying. But if it's a reputable gun shop they have already test fired it and verified it is in good working condition. And if there ends of being a problem a reputable store will apologize profusely and repair it for you at no cost within a reasonable time frame. If a gun store selling used guns doesn't make any guarantees, walk away. You want nothing from that store. But what about the gun you saw an online ad for from someone you don't know? It's a cash deal and an 'all sales are final' situation. The burden is on you to make sure it's a good deal. First off don't impulse buy a used gun you know nothing about. Believe me, I understand the temptation. I have more than one that was acquired due to raw emotions and thoughts of the "Must have the new shiny" variety. So I'm not judging you. But knowing what you're buying makes a huge difference in how well things work out for you. So you see an online ad from a guy nearby for a gun you think you want. You can afford his asking price. But is it worth his asking price? The first thing you need to do is see if it's a reasonable price. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean it's a good deal. Look up the new prices of that gun first. Often I've found that the used asking price is $50 less than a brand new one. If you really want that specific model gun, spend the extra $50 and get a brand new one that comes with factory warranties and no unknown history. It's always worth the extra $50 to buy those assurances. Then look at used prices. Search engines are your friend. No matter what gun it is, there is a recent sale of one. If the asking price is $500 you want to make sure you can't find 5 other copies of the same gun for $400. It is on you to make sure you are getting a reasonable price. If you agree to a high price and find out later you overpaid, that isn't the seller's problem. It's your problem. If you don't know how to valuate a used gun, learn first. On that note it is perfectly reasonable to be willing to pay $50 over market value because the seller lives two blocks away and you wouldn't have to drive an hour and a half to meet him. Your time has value. You also need to know how to evaluate the condition of the gun. This is more important than the price. If you overpay for a great fun that works fine.... oh well. You still got a nice gun. If you get a gun with problems it doesn't matter if you underpaid. You're out money and still don't have a working gun. When you meet up with the seller he will let you inspect the gun. That means dissembling it and checking the parts. Tell the seller up front that you'll want to do this. If he says no, walk away no matter what the price is. It is unreasonable to not let a buyer inspect the item. Doesn't matter if it's a used gun or a used leaf blower. But it is not unreasonable for the seller to want you to evaluate it quickly and make a final decision fast. So you need to know what you're looking at. You should know how to disassemble the specific model gun before you show up. You don't have to be an expert that can do it blindfolded while hanging upside down. (To anyone who gets the Major Payne reference there, you are my people). But you need to know how to do it. The seller should know too, but you'd be surprised. I bought a Glock off a guy once carried it every day for years. It was his go to side arm. He had no idea whatsoever how to disassemble it. You want to inspect the barrel to make sure there isn't pitting on the inside. (meaning rust that has been scraped off) You want to look for surface rust over the entire gun. You want to make sure there are no cracks in the frame or any signs of serious neglect. Any chips out of the metal around the chamber or rust are big red warning flags. Does the firing pin or striker come come through the breach when manually pressed? Check all these things and more. But what if the gun looks fine overall but the barrel has some pitting on it? Circle back to knowing what the value of the gun is in advance, you should also have an idea of what the individual parts cost in advance. Say you have a Glock 19 you want to buy. You should already know how much under new retail the seller is asking. If it is $100 less than retail but it has a bad barrel you should know that a replacement barrel will run you $100 or more. So suddenly this gun could cost you as much or more a brand new one. But maybe everything looks fine except the striker. The seller tells you up front it is broken and he just wants to get rid of the gun. You should know that the striker is a $25 to $40 part depending on where you buy it. And it's easy to replace. If that is the only problem you add $25 - $40 to the total price and if it's still a good deal, great! If you put it all together and function test it and everything seems to work like it's supposed to and the price seems right, enjoy your new used gun! For a gun like a Glock this is easy. They all work the same way and quickly break down in to 4 parts that are easy to inspect. If it has a red dot sight just make sure that work as well. Same for an AR-15 or any other easy to dissemble gun. But if the deal is for a .22lr rifle that has a bunch of tiny parts and requires tools to dissemble, that's a bigger risk. I can field strip my Glocks and inspect them and resemble them in 2 minutes. But I have a .22lr rifle that takes me 20 minutes to disassemble and needs a wrench and a screwdriver. (Guess how often I clean it? The grey gunk that oozes out of it will give you a hint.) A seller isn't going to spend an hour letting you figure out how to take apart his gun for a $200 sale. So this is more of a risk. I recently passed on a .22 rifle with a scope. It was $250 but I wasn't an expert in the model rifle. And with all the parts of the gun, the scope, the rings, any one of which could have been a problem this cheap rifle had the potential of being a really expensive rifle quickly. So I walked away. You don't want to buy a project gun unless you're into fixing up old ones and know how to evaluate parts needs quickly. No matter what, you're taking a risk buying a used gun without firing it. Now, if you can meet at the range and test it first, all the better. Nothing like seeing that it works properly before buying. That covers how to check the quality of the gun and pricing. But you also need to consider the seller. If you are bad at judging people quickly, buying used guns from strangers is not for you. When I buy a used gun I am evaluating the seller as much as I am evaluating the condition of the gun. Does he seem honest? Does he seem like he is hiding something about the condition of it? Is he covered in blood and in a hurry to complete the sale? You need to observe these details. Maybe I'm not sure about the condition of the gun but I trust the seller. I may be willing to take a little extra chance that it works fine. On that same note, you need to make sure the seller doesn't give off a "I'm going to kill you" vibe. If you are buying a handgun you need to transfer it at an FFL. Do your inspection of the gun and disassembly inside the well lit store. The FFL will want to see your driver's license and the seller's driver's license. At that point the seller isn't likely to be a criminal. I feel very safe in this situation being in a gun store where the FFL has a copy of the seller's ID. Bad guys intending to do you harm aren't going to do all this. They will stick to the Craigslist deals for a TV to lure in a victim carrying cash to a back ally meet up spot. But if it's a long gun and an FFL isn't required your guard needs to be WAY up. First off you can say you want to do a transfer through an FFL anyway. It'll cost you an extra $20 to $50 depending on your FFL fees but that gives you all the protections mentioned above. If you don't want to do that make sure you have a safe meet up place. And be armed. Do not show up to meet a guy you know will have a gun when you are unarmed. Do not be that stupid. When I buy or sell things on Craigslist I like to meet up in front of a nearby bank's ATM because the ATM has a security camera running 24/7. I used to tell people why I picked that spot and that I knew the bank manager who would give me the video (I didn't actually know the manager, but they didn't know that). I've had 1 person who wasn't interested in meeting me there after that and I was happy to not make that sale. Pro Tip: Don't meet to exchange a gun in front of a bank. That's called being a moron. It's a great option for buying a used DVD from Facebook Marketplace. But for a gun sale you want a public place that won't invite scrutiny over a visible gun. The parking lot of a gun store is often a good option. There will be security cameras. The people who are in that parking lot won't freak out by seeing a gun. You should check with the store first to make sure they are cool with it. They may even welcome you to do a non FFL exchange inside depending on how friendly they are. If the seller has any hesitation to a public place with cameras, stop the conversation and block his email. I also said if you can test the gun first, that's better. But don't invite a seller you don't know to your outdoor range where you will be the only two people there shooting live ammo. Be smarter than that. You'll be focused on the gun and inspecting it, not the stranger who you know has guns. If you can't meet at a populated range you should skip the testing part. Get a dated bill of sale that includes the seller's info from his driver's license and the serial number of the gun. If that gun turns out to be a murder weapon you'll be very happy that you have some evidence that you gained possession of it after the date of the crime and have someone else you can point the cops towards. Same thing goes if you are selling a gun. If the gun you sold ends up being used in a crime you'll be very happy you have evidence that it left your possession prior to that. There are downloadable blank bill of sale forms all over the internet. You don't have to make up a custom one. Finally, know the laws in your state. Does this gun have to be transferred through an FFL or is a face to face sale legal? Is the gun you are buying legal in your state? The odds that the seller is actually an ATF agent setting you up is never 0. Be smart. If he tries to convince you that you don't need to go through an FFL to transfer his full auto suppressed SBR it's definitely an ATF agent.

• 
  Diluc (@hsaffiliate2025) reported 37 minutes ago

  A company with 30 employees made $1 billion a year. Not Google. Not Facebook. Craigslist. At its peak, revenue per employee was 10-20x Google's. The founder did everything "wrong": rejected billions from VCs, ran zero ads, and demoted himself to customer support. Then within 6 years, revenue crashed 70%+. Here’s the real story. • Started as a simple email list in 1995 by Craig Newmark, an IBM programmer. • Friends asked to post jobs and rentals. He built a bare-bones website — intentionally ugly, like a community bulletin board. • Zero marketing spend. Network effects did all the work. • In 1999, he made it a for-profit company but kept 99% free. Charged only for some job posts in a few cities. • In 2000, he stepped down as CEO to become a customer service rep. He didn't like managing people. • The result: ~30 employees, ~$1B annual revenue (reportedly, around 2018). For comparison, Google's per-employee revenue was ~$1.2M; Facebook's ~$1.6M. Craigslist's was $20-35M. • They rejected every opportunity to make more money. Every niche they dominated was later turned into a billion-dollar company by someone else: • Jobs → LinkedIn • Housing → Zillow • Goods → eBay, Facebook Marketplace • Then crises hit: • 2004: eBay bought 30% of Craigslist without founders' consent. Legal battle followed. Craigslist converted to an LLC to avoid shareholder profit demands. • 2009: "Craigslist killer" — a medical student used the site to commit murder. The adult services section, worth $36M/year, was shut down. • Mobile revolution: Craigslist stayed ugly and desktop-only. Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016, fully mobile, with real names. It surpassed 1 billion users by 2021. • Revenue reportedly dropped from ~$1B (2018) to ~$300M (2023). A 70% decline. The irony? The same principles that built Craigslist killed it: • 99% free → no money to modernize • No investment → no strategic pivot • Anti-commercial → picked apart by specialists Craig Newmark today lives in an apartment, owns no car, keeps pigeons. He's donated over $500M to journalism — the very industry his site helped destroy. This isn't a story of failure. It's a story of choices. You can live by your values and be comfortable. But markets don't wait. Craigslist's decline was a choice. Takeaway: If you don't evolve, you get eaten. Security and growth rarely coexist. Follow for more real AI money breakdowns. #Craigslist #BusinessLessons

• 
  Matt James (@mattejames) reported 43 minutes ago

  In the same way that Craigslist was a generic solution to the problems better served by more tailored solutions like Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and other marketplaces.

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  🇺🇸🇻🇦🏴‍☠️🥖✒️ (@dailyprandium) reported 43 minutes ago

  Decentralized media is a boom for factions, special interest, partisan extremism, and constructing reality to divide and conquer US Old media had 30 years to fix their houses but they never got over the Craigslist disruption to their sacred classifieds payola

• 
  🐝 Carol Walsh ^Monterey Bay^ (@CarolWalshReal1) reported 43 minutes ago

  We built a garden shed from scratch replacing an old falling down shack. No plans just husband and I building with materials we could get off of Craigslist. It was so nice with the cobblestone floor we were like I don't know should we make this a hangout room instead of just parking the riding mower?

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  Lady Soleil (@LadySoleil33) reported 46 minutes ago

  🙌 Hits it on the nail! I remember when Facebook started I was in school and we were using Friendster so, what did FB do to take over? Same with Airbnb - craigslist was also doing rentals - Uber same....how can you take over the Yellow cabseveryone has been using for years - thinking outside of the box and narrowing it down to one problem to resolve is usually the winning strategy 💫

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  Cúper Y. Ashraf (@Cuuper22) reported 48 minutes ago

  @GregHBurnham I hate the gpt "reasonable/practical/useful/clean....safe" garbage. I get its use for safety, but it is so annoying as it makes the thinking paradigm soooo ngmi coated regardless of scope/topic. Like they are really good at finding potential failure modes and problems. However, it treats it as an immovable object and execuse to downscope whatever the prompt entails. For example, i asked it to retrieve and store info from a Wikipedia page that need formatting in an md file: 3 turns arguing that the page is inaccessible as the python environment it has has "no direct wikipedia to md tool" and i had to tell it which tools to do. 2 turns arguing about how the file size is large and content being long to be displayed inline, thus it won't attempt it and it provided a" cleaner script for you to run on your machine". And some turns to get it to do basic data processing as it kept falling beck to try to "verify from online" if the generated processing was accurate or not and when it couldn't it just stops to tell me it didn't do any work because of that, fyi, the data in question was simply <100 rows and the processing is just getting median and mean of the entries for some wc stuff. So not a sophisticated LHC calibration and testing data. Fallback to certainty is ok. The issie is it also happens on another end. Like I asked it (codex here) to view craigslist ads for some housing and so and filter based on some criteria. For some reason, it felt like it needed smoke tests, ledgers, evidence packets, and deployment pipeline with robust standard, which wasted the token limit for an incomplete final output. You would ask for "find me good shoes to use for hiking XYZ mountain" it will tunnle vision to shoes exciplicitly associated with mt XYZ, if not found, it starts to downscope to regular shoes. Where if it had only looked for hiking shoes then eliminated due to to XYZ specifics.

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  BoVodio Toad (@BovodioToad) reported 49 minutes ago

  @LuckyMcGee lol. I'm just thinking, if you plan to stick it down with silicone, you really need another set of hands. Look on FB marketplace or Craigslist for a handy man and hire them for an hour or two. Maybe reach out to thumbtack if you don't trust the locals.

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  Alicia (@BarracoAlicia) reported 52 minutes ago

  @1995_nightowl Damn, that’s next-level neighborhood apocalypse. Karen didn’t just fumble the bag—she burned the whole village down, collected blackmail checks, shopped the baby like it was Craigslist furniture, and then dropped the video as the grand finale.

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  Polsia (@polsia) reported 52 minutes ago

  Every used listing on Marketplace or Craigslist is an information asymmetry problem. The seller knows what's wrong. You don't. Built DealVet to close that gap. Paste any listing, get an AI verdict, fair price estimate, red flags, and negotiation tips in minutes. Every category.

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  Spaceballs The X Account (@Grunt2A) reported 54 minutes ago

  @shenan_igan Not yet. I'm going to research it more. It could be the motor drive bands. They apparently go bad and cause the drive to not know the laser's position which throws errors. The laser has an adjuster screw too as a last resort, because if you adjust it wrong it kills it in the unrecoverable way And then I'd check Craigslist. I've really like to fix it so I don't have to mess with transferring my saved game files and account info to a new system Keep in mind my son has an XBOX Series X that this game will play perfectly fine on. But that is besides the point! My Nintendo Entertainment System that I bought with my own money that I saved in coins in 1990 still works. My stupid XBOX needs to!

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  Citizen (@afistfulofteeth) reported 55 minutes ago

  @MidlifeCrysis_ It still can’t be functionally equivalent at all. Consumer initiated transfers transfers work from a business standpoint or a legal stand point. If this were to happen, then Sony would be getting in the middle of sale disputes between random people. Bob down the street could agree to trade games with his neighbor Steven. Then go to initiate the transfer from Sony (or do it themselves if you think that would happen). Then the key gets transferred and what happened? Steven didn’t pay Bob!! Who would they have to go to fix this or dispute it? Sony! This is just one instance. Multiply that by millions. You have to think about the big picture. Companies aren’t going to put themselves out there to be legally liable for crackheads selling video game licenses on Craigslist.

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  Ryan S. Powers (@RyanSPowers) reported 58 minutes ago

  @NickPocheVOTE Reminds me of the H St Streetcar. My first landlord in DC pitched the streetcar in the Craigslist ad (!!!) in 2009. I moved to Boston for a year in 2011 & back in 2013 and it still didn’t open for another three years. And then shut down for good 10 years after that…

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  Adrian Chivu (@AdrianChivu6) reported 60 minutes ago

  My go-to pre-sell landers are advertorials. And the type of advertorials that I've scaled the hardest are the one-story ones. I am pushing this exact structure to $30k days right now. And that basic diagram pretty much explains the whole structure. This pre-sell lander doesn’t have blocks. It has one continuous story holding the whole page up. So here's how you build an advertorial that doesn't have a **** structure: 1. Status quo fails - this is not "you have a problem." Anyone can write that... it's the copywriting equivalent of showing up to a first date and going "so you're single, huh." What actually works is that the reader's best previous attempt already failed, and ideally it failed on the word of someone credible (i.e. "My doctor told me there was nothing he could do"). Keep it short and clear. The reader already lived this problem, so you don't need to narrate their pain back to them; you just need to say the failure precisely enough that they go "wait, that's me." 2. Expert reframes it - here's where it gets fun, because this is the actual hinge the whole page swings on, and most pre-sell landers I see out there are just skipping it. A credible outsider shows up and says "actually, that's not why this is happening", and reframes the cause into something the reader never connected to their own situation. For example, "the nerves in your feet are suffocating and dying off" is not a sentence a normal person says about their own foot pain. It's a sentence a guy in a white coat says, and it works specifically because it's dramatic AND it's coming from someone whose job title makes the drama feel earned instead of manufactured. If you skip this part entirely, you probably jump straight from "my life sucks" to "buy my thing," which is not a story, it's a Craigslist ad... 3. Transformation is proof - this is the actual cheat code, and it's the part people underrate the hardest. Normal pages need a separate testimonials section because nobody's been following any one person's story A one-story lander doesn't need that section at all, because the reader has been walking through one person's entire arc this whole time, and their result at the end of it just is the testimonial. Nobody had to tell you it works. You watched it happen in real time, sentence by sentence, which lands completely differently than 5-star icons and a stranger's name under a quote. 4. Convert - by the time the offer shows up, the readers already believe the mechanism, they already saw it pay off, so the actual purchase decision has basically already happened in their head. The CTA at this point is a formality, and this is also why guarantees and bonuses do more here than on a modular landing page. They're not there to convince, they're there to remove the last tiny bit of friction for someone who's already decided. And this my friend, is an advertorial structure that prints $100k days on cold traffic. That's why it converts so well. Nothing on the page should feel like persuasion. It feels like a story that happens to end with a product.