If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.

The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it’s more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.

He went on to discuss the positive aspect of free as well as the negative. It was really a brilliant post.

So, I’ve decided to start charging for access to this site.

Just kidding.

But, it did raise some pretty interesting questions about our expectations as consumers. We use free services all day long. I use gmail for email, facebook and twitter for social networking, a hotmail account for any form I have to fill out online that I think will result in spam, hulu to catch up on tv, google news to get my news, and so on and so forth.

I also aspire to write. I’d even like to *gasp* get paid to do it one day. So, how do I balance that with loving my free stuff? Of course, this is a similar conversation to the one we had last week about music producers and royalties. We’re no less willing to pay for things, we simply want actual value for our dollars. So, one day, I hope you’ll pay for my writing, in book form or something. But before that day comes, I hope my writing will become valuable enough to ask people to pay for it.

Are there any products you’re happy paying for even though there’s a free, legal alternative?