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Is there room for another classified ads website?
It would appear that Craigslist has this market on lock down. Craigslist is almost the term people use when referencing online classified ads in general - like Kleenex.
With all the simplicities of Craigslist though, it seems like it could be updated and done better. I know 'better' is subjective, but a lot of newer technologies have come out since Craigslist was initially released. The concept could perhaps be modernized a bit.
Do you think there's room in the market for another Craigslist? What kind of things could make classified ads better?
- p01nd3xt3r 16y agoYes. I am currently working on one just for shits and giggles. Its called spotted.at http://spotted.at http://spotted.at The things that I am focusing on are a) realtime b) not having to provide phone number c) valid listings (e.g.: listing disappears once item is gone)
- Skywing 16y agoHow do you plan on determining when an item has been sold or a listing has been "fulfilled"? The only way I could think of would be to make it as easy as possible for the ad's poster to mark the listing as expired, or something.
- veb 16y agoI really love the idea with the map/location. Keep at it. :-)
- vyrotek 16y agoI sure hope so. I stopped using Craigslist a while ago and really only use my local news company's classifieds online now. They might have more 'stuff' on Craigslist but I'm really turned off by the spam and the old feel of the site. Their neglect for a great UI and consumer experience lost them a user. I am by no means a hardcore classifieds user, but I would really like a site that had a much more powerful search, better spam filtering and a way to clean out expired items more quickly.
- korch 16y agoI think there's huge room in the market for another Craigslist. At least a few billion. I just don't think it can be done without a missing piece of the puzzle nobody can yet see. Like you said, the term "Craiglist" is almost a synonym, a diluted brand name for classifieds themselves. Even if tomorrow we had 500 new, cutting-edge, fully-featured, polished classified sites just waiting for users, and waiting for developers to do things you'd never think of on Craigslist, well, it wouldn't matter at all. Are users going to visit, post and maintain their accounts across 500 sites? No way, they'll pick the biggest on and stick with it. It's the same exact strategy that Facebook used to the de-facto online profile. This is why no other classified sites have been able to pick up enough self-sustaining momentum to even make a dent in Craigslist. As a "solution" to break this stalemate, either all the classified sites will need to federate their data, or they will all need to allow each other to scrape each other's content. Fat chance of either of those happening though. So we're going to be stuck with Craigslist for a long time. No doubt something new and totally unexpected will develop and steal Craigslist's thunder, but I have no idea what that thing is going to be.
- veb 16y agoNew Zealand desperately needs -something- good. For example, there's a student job search site (only for students) with around 2 pages full of awesome freelancer jobs (with good pay) yet I cannot sign up/get in contact with the submitters (because I'm not a student). That's food for thought. I mentioned New Zealand, so perhaps you can find a locality where a Craigslist-type website would pay off well.
- trouble 16y agoCould you tell me the name of the site? I've been out of New Zealand for awhile, but it would be interesting to see what's available.
- veb 16y agohttp://sjs.co.nz http://sjs.co.nz -- when I was looking about a month ago, there was 37 jobs with an average time of 10 hours a week at $25 an hour. They were all sorts: coding eCommerce, website maintenance, Wordpress development etc. (to search, type 'home' then find 'IT/Computer' in the classification drop down) Generally I find it has a better range of casual/part-time or even full-time than Seek/TradeMe.
- trouble 16y agoThank you kindly!
- ig1 16y agoI think Craigslist/Gumtree/Kijiji are already done for. Their big value came from cross-selling across products and being the one place for everything. This was hugely valuable in the time of Yahoo where content discovery was difficult. Now with the ease of content discovery the market is fragmenting into specialist sites, look at the profitable areas of Cragislist: housing, cars, dating. They all have specialist sites which are doing better than Craigslist, by taking the most profitable chunks of the market niche competitors are able to spend more per user in marketing and thus beat Craigslist. In ten years time Craigslist is just going to be left with the least profitable classified ads. You have to ask yourself is that what you want to be competing for ? Your best bet would probably to concentrate on a particular niche that you want to steal away from Craigslist (local sales, etc.) and figure out the problems people face in that niche and use that to break into the market, rather than trying to compete with Craigslist across the board in what is already a dying model.