About

The Worst Room is a single topic blog highlighting photographs and descriptions of expensive, small and unsanitary rooms placed for rent on the classified advertisement site Craigslist.

Origin

On May 2nd, 2013, freelance cinematographer Ryan Nethery launched a Tumblr blog titled "The Worst Room" as a place to catalog the terrible rooms for rent he had discovered on Craigslist while trying to find housing in New York City. The first post featured a photograph of a windowless room for rent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for $850 (shown below).

Spread

On May 8th, Redditor rotzooi posted a link to the blog to the /r/nyc^[4] subreddit, where it received over 640 up votes and 240 comments prior to being archived. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the Tumblr blog, including The Huffington Post,^[1] BuzzFeed,^[2] Laughing Squid^[5] and The Daily Dot.^[6] On June 25th, the New York Daily News published an interview with Nethery, revealing that the site had reached over 25,000 followers on Tumblr. On June 26th, the /r/theworstroom^[3] subreddit was launched to showcase ads for rental apartments in exceptionally poor condition. On December 3rd, The Worst Room was featured on Tumblr's year-in-review list of top ten most viral blogs of 2013.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References