So how did KSL Classifieds become what everyone else around Utah uses? Like most business stories, it’s good timing and connections. And because it’s Utah, it of course involves the Mormon Church.

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To hear current KSL executives tell it, KSL Classifieds began in a backroom closet office. And like most business lore, it includes an obligatory short-sighted executive convinced it was all going to fail.

The executive, in this case, was smarting over spending $800. Around 2000, Russell Banz, who at the time was working on KSL.com, the stations’ website, had come up with the idea to run online classified ads and needed the money to buy software for it. He kept asking and asking and, finally, the executive relented. The money came but with a vote of no confidence. “You got your money, but we’re never getting our $800 back,” Banz remembers the executive saying.

What made Banz’s scheme seem even crazier at the time is that he wanted to make the ads free for individual users. Newspapers were used to charging several dollars per line in print, and these web guys wanted to give it away for nothing. To Banz, though, this was intuitive. He had the bigger goal of making KSL the destination for locals, and the way to entice users was to make using it free. Whether someone was looking for news or a new car, Banz’s mantra was, “Heard it on KSL, saw it on KSL, got it on KSL.”

KSL launched a classifieds section online early and aggressively in 2000, while in general, the newspaper industry was hesitant. “They didn’t want to cannibalize their business. They were highly, highly, highly profitable, and classifieds were the most profitable part of the business,” says Peter Zollman, a consultant at Advanced Interactive Media Group whose specialties include classified advertising. KSL had the advantage of not worrying about destroying an existing business to build a new one. It also beat the competition—Craigslist didn’t expand into Salt Lake City until 2004.

Today, according to the company’s vice president of e-commerce, Eric Bright, KSL Classifieds gets over 100 million page views a month, and it employs 100 full-time staff. Like Craigslist, KSL Classifieds charges for commercial listings like those from realtors and car dealers. It also charges extra to feature ads, and in a move that perfectly embodies the dense commercialization of the modern internet space, it runs display ads right next to its classifieds ads.

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Like all things special to one’s hometown, KSL Classifieds can inspire intense loyalty. “We get request from out of staters all of the time who are generally Utah transplants who are like, ‘Please can you bring KSL to Phoenix,’” says Bright. (True story: The Atlantic editor J. Weston Phippen sold his ’64 Volkswagen Beetle on KSL Classifieds while he was living in Phoenix to a guy in Salt Lake City.)