21 ms·

Craigslist has been disrupted

218 points by rpsubhub 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago
I guess, but I've never heard of any of the things disrupting it, other than AirBnB. The apartment spam on Craigslist just means that it's harder to find an apartment, not that there is some other site to use.
- notJim 16y ago
  Surely you're exaggerating. You've never heard of Etsy, okcupid, PlentyofFish, StubHub, or CouchSurfing? CouchSurfing in particular is mentioned very often alongside AirBnB, and okcupid has had at least one front page story on HN this year (namely their acquisition.)
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I might be an atypical user (?), but none of those sites appear to do the two things I and everyone else I know use Craigslist for: 1) buy/sell used goods; and 2) find long-term apartment rentals. For #1, eBay seems to be the only real competitor, and does non-shippable goods poorly (Ebay Classifieds has never really taken off). For #2, I don't really know of any (AirBnB and Couchsurfing are good for trips, but not really for finding somewhere to live).
    - notJim 16y ago
      I agree with you that none of these sites actually tackle the main uses of craigslist. I was merely questioning your assertion that you'd never heard of any of them :).
FirstHopSystems 16y ago
Good enough has been Craigslist biggest strength. You sure can innovate your self out of a good product, It does not always mean improvement. Disruption..I don't think so, competition yes. I'm pretty sure the use of disruption is getting diluted...... For the website It's not getting worse, that's a decent accomplishment for a website that's been around for such a long time. When Craigslist is dead and gone, then I think we can have a informed decision about Craigslist disrupted status.(Wait! Just checked.....still lots of postings)
staunch 16y ago
Housing and Jobs are probably 90% of Craigslist traffic (and 100% of revenue?). AirBnB is not even trying to be a replacement for Craigslist's housing section (and it isn't). It's a replacement for Hotels.com Indeed/SimplyHired are nothing more than modern day Monster.com/Dice.com. I also wouldn't take that Quantcast estimated chart at face value. It could easily be that even the trend is wrong and Craigslist is doing better than ever.
hansy 16y ago
"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site." Pretty sure Craig Newmark is a nonprofit sort of guy with perfunctory role in the company. Blame Jim Buckmaster for Craigslist's refusal to evolve.
- dedward 16y ago
  The only people who are in a position to lay any blame are the owners.... and we can be fairly certain the site is going in the direction they want it to.
CurrentB 16y ago
I wonder how much of this disruption can be attributed to the removal of the erotic ads section. You can see a major slowing of momentum around the time they were taken down (May '09). I mean that was an area without any major competition and which I'm sure accounted for TONS of traffic.
naner 16y ago
I am actually really glad Craigslist doesn't try to Buzz or #Dickbar itself and doesn't have those obnoxious social buttons/plugins all over the place. Newmark just wants to maintain a useful simple site. That's why Craigslist will be around forever, he doesn't spring unwelcome surprises on his userbase. Also Craigslist probably gets used more heavily when the economy isn't doing so well. I'm not sure his magical line graph is as predictive as he imagines.
nir 16y ago
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling. I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.
- georgieporgie 16y ago
  Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users. I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.
  - rhizome 16y ago
    It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
    - brianpan 16y ago
      I'd say the flag help forum (and the help forums in general) are prime examples of "consistently awful, frustrating experience".
    - georgieporgie 16y ago
      It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
jackmanbob 16y ago
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site. In ten years I think Craigslist will be an afterthought..." If I were pocketing $50M per year for 10 years, I wouldn't give a damn if the site wasn't around at the end.
dpcan 16y ago
Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist. Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way. It was perfect.
- originalgeek 16y ago
  And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off. However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Google search for something like "Craigslist ad not showing up". Then there was the merry-go-round of pathetic employees I was trying to hire for the unskilled jobs in my warehouse. But that was back in 2008, before the bubble burst. The quality of the applicants I found in my more recent go at it was greatly improved. But the frustration now was 300 resumes showing up in my inbox in 12 hours, and sifting that down to 10 people to interview I guess I should not complain about that, it is a little frustrating though. The bottom line is Craigslist will always be around because it works, and it works anywhere. There isn't any limited deployment like some of these startups that are piloting in 2 cities. And probably won't go nationwide for a long time, if at all. From what I read here on HN, the name of the game is for the startups to make the big sale and founders glide away on their golden parachutes, then the buyer crashes the company into the ground.
  - adammichaelc 16y ago
    Had to look that one up. Pretty circular definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/iphone/#define?term=ghosted http://www.urbandictionary.com/iphone/#define?term=ghosted
    - originalgeek 16y ago
      It's Craigslist jargon. I learned it off the forums I was lucky enough to accidentally stumble into.
aresant 16y ago
As a business in 2010 CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads, and 17% from rentals. The adult ads went out the window which is going to hurt them, a LOT, in terms of both traffic and revenue. So the more material question is has CL's largest revenue category - job's - been disrupted? I was able to dig up this graph of job mention volume and it appears that CL, in their most important category, is gaining velocity, not slowing down: http://www.jobgoround.com/tools/craigslist-job-trends/ http://www.jobgoround.com/tools/craigslist-job-trends/ (set to one year) and http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Craigslist http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Craigslist Reference for percentage of revenues: http://www.ere.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-2010-revenue.jpg http://www.ere.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-201...
- extension 16y ago
  CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads Not surprising, as those are markets with a supply-demand imbalance. These seem to gravitate towards marketplaces that require lots of hoop jumping, I guess because it artificially pares down the demand.
- dennisgorelik 16y ago
  It does not look like number of job postings on CraigsList grew much. Number of job postings overall on all web sites in the last grew more than on CraigsList (due to recovering economy).
turar 16y ago
Funny, seems that the author of the image in the article only uses "adult" and "rants and raves" categories on Craigslist. :)
- scrod 16y ago
  A relevant comment from the post: >You might want to put lines on that graph showing that Craigslist was sued for its adult classifieds on May 4th and removed the section on September 4th. One could argue that the disruption has primarily occurred because of those events.
dman 16y ago
gnu grep disrupted, folks using new fangled Google instead. Craiglist is a great, stable design that works with a uniform interface to do common transactions that occur in most peoples lives. Can they be outpaced within a vertical? Sure, but their USP lies in the newspaper classifieds that they sought to displace originally. Until someone else comes up with a better catch all for real life transactions that is more economical and convenient, I wouldnt consider craigslist disrupted.
carlosag 16y ago
I completely agree with Josh that there is a gap in functionality that needs to be filled. I often hear the argument that I should be grateful for this free online service... Poppycock! My attention on the internet is worth something. Especially for such a profitable industry as classifieds. If I'm looking for a house on the internet I want to be able to zoom into a certain area on a map and click 'refresh' to see all the relevant rentals with little pins on the map. This is not rocket science. Craigslist has a rich database and could make it far more useful and user friendly. There is something to be said for simple and minimalist design. Craigslist, however seems 'not designed' at all with little regard for making things easy to find or relevant.
- dedward 16y ago
  So somoene is free to go out and fill it - craigslist is under no obligation to do this. They're private. They can do what they want. Just because a whole LOT of people would love to get their hands on it because they think they could make billions off it or monetize it better doesn't turn it into an obligation. Craigslist is what it is - and if Newmark is pulling in 50 million a year off it, for all this time, he's probably not all that concerned if the site dwindles out over the next half a decade, if it does that. Unless he has a horrid gambling habit he's probably sitting awfully pretty right about now. Nobody's forcing you to use craigslist. If you have a better site out there, go use it. IF you think you can do better, try pitching it to them. IF you just want to whine that it's not as good as it could be and you aren't satisfied as a customer... wait.. you aren't a customer. Nevermind. Craigslist is doing fine without you.
- ericd 16y ago
  Try PadMapper. That kind of interface probably wouldn't work very well at Craigslist's scale, though, with their headcount.
bigwally 16y ago
Dealing with Craigslist in NY I found it to be full of scammers and spammers. Buying from people listing on craigslist is very much a buyer beware experience. Plenty of bait and switch. And my personal favorite "It's currently in pieces, you can pay me and take the pieces away. All the pieces are there but you have to pay cash first." Craigslist has a lot of room for improvement and it would great to see useful changes made.
- rick888 16y ago
  This is one of the biggest problems: no feedback system for accounts. Since there is almost no barrier to entry, it's really easy for scammers.
protomyth 16y ago
What's wrong with just being a stable place? Why does everything have to evolve? Craigslist works fine for a lot of people. It is familiar, doesn't hog bandwidth, and doesn't leak personal information like a sieve. Sometimes a hammer just needs to keep being a hammer.
- kj12345 16y ago
  Great point. I think this concept of "disruption" is out of place anyway when the existing site is mostly free and works fine on mobile devices. You might be able to steal traffic bit by bit by doing a better job, but there's nothing to really disrupt in a dramatic way.
calloc 16y ago
So Craigslist is supposedly being disrupted by all of these startups that are taking over various parts of what Craigslist does, and yet I don't know any of those competitors. When I am looking for something cheap, I go to Craigslist. I don't want to have to remember 10 - 20 different site names because of different categories. That in and of itself is a great plus to Craigslist. It's all there when you get to the page...
- diego 16y ago
  We have remote employees that come to San Francisco for 1-4 weeks at a time. We used to find temporary places for them on Craigslist. AirBnB is much more helpful.
bandushrew 16y ago
This graph: http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd771cb9c9a0d126d0af76 http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd7... is showing exactly the reason Craigslist is doing well. Each of the alternatives displayed represents a specialized, vertical solution for just one (or a couple) of the categories offered by Craigslist, There is no way that Craigslist could compete head to head with every one of them anyway, at best they could choose a couple of categories and build new products focused on them. Instead they are choosing to be a general platform. Nothing lasts forever, and no doubt Craigslist will fade away over time, as will facebook, myspace and Windows itself, but in the meantime they are pretty well positioned, providing a 'good enough' solution for a wide range of categories is just as reasonable as providing a targetted solution to a specific category. What they would absolutely fail to do is provide an excellent vertical solution for every category they offer, Which means those competitors on that graph would still exist even if Craigslist improved its site, and probably they would still be doing well.
- rgarcia 16y ago
  I completely agree. I'm surprised at the level of negativity towards CL here. I would expect a community of hackers to recognize a highly generic solution like CL when they see one. The only critique I would give is that if CL were really trying to be a generic platform that does a decent job at solving a myriad of problems, then they should open themselves up and have an official API. Right now all of the CL mashups do some kind of scraping to get their data.
- pdaviesa 16y ago
  You know, that's a really good point. I may go straight to StubHub if I'm really into seeing ballgames, but am I really going to remember the hot new startups focusing on apartment rentals, spa services, or used car parts? No, I'm just going to Craigslist for any of my peripheral needs.
  - ericd 16y ago
    Exactly, the inability to remember 50 specialized marketplaces means that CL's position is pretty much secure.
tokenadult 16y ago
As an outsider looking in, I'm wondering to what degree the comments posted here on HN about Facebook (that it is full of people who don't tell the truth and who try to scam for monetary advantage) report a fact of human nature that might eventually disrupt Quora? What is Quora's defense against turning into a place with rather low-quality posts as soon as it attracts a lot of eyeballs?
jjhjh 16y ago
Who cares? It's Craig's list, not your list. He can do whatever the hell he wants with it. In addition I get the impression most people here who lambast CL as being full of spam live in areas that CL is not thriving in. Ask a New Yorker or a Bay Area resident about how useful CL is and then rethink your perspective. CL works. It gets the job done. 'Nuff said.
Gaussian 16y ago
Simply plotting their apartments or stuff for sale on a map would make a big difference in ease of use. A YC company, Padmapper, does this for you, but why doesn't CL see this as utterly necessary? Searching for something, be it an oak table or a house rental, is exasperating. Realtor.com, a site that's totally behind, got on the mapping thing more than a year ago. Amazing that CL hasn't done the same.
- originalgeek 16y ago
  I dunno, it's pretty effective to narrow one's search by the part of town you're looking in, for example, in L.A. you can break it down by Central L.A., SF Valley, SG Valley, etc. and then search by city name. Click the map link to see where the exact location is. It's really not that hard. Found my current jewel of a home that way.
- tsuyoshi 16y ago
  Maybe CL looks at Padmapper and thinks "oh great, somebody else did it and now we don't have to".
extension 16y ago
Here is why Craigslist was so successful in the first place: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
nfriedly 16y ago
Is there anything better than CL for apartments in the SF area? RentHop (in the graphic in the article) looks like it's NYC only. I'm looking at a move to San Mateo this summer and every "apartment finder" website I've tried has been a pitiful experience.
- jarek 16y ago
  Take a look at padmapper - it's craigslist apartments data with filtering and on a map.
  - nfriedly 16y ago
    I'll check it out - thanks.
  - nihaar 16y ago
    May I recommend MapThatPad as well to store your results
drallison 16y ago
I, for one, prefer the no-frills Craigslist approach to any of the competitors.
mikiem 16y ago
Don't underestimate the beauty that is the cash cow.
- tsotha 16y ago
  Seriously. How many sites have gone the way of Digg, innovating their way into obscurity? If CL is still on top after all these years they're doing something right, even if that something is... nothing.
kristofferR 16y ago
The sad thing is that it would be quite easy to drastically improve Craigslist. First, a simple CSS and design cleanup like this one: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigslist7_f.jpg http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigsl... No drastic changes, just a cleanup. Then you add an advanced search tool with maps and filtering based on some criterias like distance and price. Then there's issue of spam. Solve these three issues, and CL is basically "fixed".
slyall 16y ago
Now I realise that everybody here lives in CA or NY but there are plenty of places around the world where craigslist never took off. http://sydney.craigslist.com.au/apa/ http://sydney.craigslist.com.au/apa/ http://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/ http://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/ http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/ http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/ http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/ http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/ and it's interesting that: http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/ http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/ seems to have ads all in English.
bugsy 16y ago
I don't know. The author states that CL is a bad site as if it is an accepted fact. He doesn't make a case for it he just starts with it as an axiom. Why does he assume this? Maybe it doesn't have enough flash, or css shadows or what? CL is a great site that does exactly what people expect of it. You post classified ads in your local market and people get in touch with you. It is a web based classified ad and it works. When I want to buy something used locally and am not in a hurry I look through CL. Right now there is no other site organized to do this that works and is available in every market. Why should there be? CL works fine. Because it's free it killed off newspaper classifieds but so what. Their bitter and angry competitors have to resort to dirty tricks like trying to get the police and FBI to investigate CL, which shows how desperate and out of ideas the competition is.
itgoon 16y ago
I have no problem with this. He doesn't need to re-invest - he's the only investor (more or less). As was pointed out, there's other sites which do a better job, so if you don't like it, don't use it. Mr. Newmark and his staff are well-off with little effort. Even if they lose 90% of their revenue, we're still talking millions. Heck, that's brilliant.
vaksel 16y ago
craigslist won't be disrupted for the simple reason because they have a ton of traffic...UI etc, is pointless for classifieds since the only thing people care about is whether or not the service has buyers/sellers for the things they want...and Craigslist has that in spades. i.e. I recently listed a car for sale on craigslist...listed it on Friday evening and got 8 interested people in a few hours, and it sold the next day.
- far33d 16y ago
  I'm sure there's someone who said that about newspaper classifieds once too.
  - vaksel 16y ago
    newspaper classifieds didn't have the traffic in a single location
nicelios 16y ago
Despite these disruptions, the company is unparalleled from a profit-per-employee perspective. Craiglist's network effect may have reached its limit, but the company will continue to make huge profits. They clearly favor maintenance over product development, but that doesn't diminish their status as a profit-per-employee anomaly.
d2 16y ago
The graph is US traffic only and they peaked at 16.6% of the entire US population visiting the site once a month. Google called this the "law of large numbers" in 2006 when they predicted a slowing in their growth and Microsoft did the same a long time ago when they hit saturation. The drop is only during the last 6 months, is less than 10% and could be a variety of factors including a stats gathering quirk, recession, etc.
donniefitz2 16y ago
Craig's List can be enhanced. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.
rickyjoshi01 16y ago
The problem with the article is that it believes that sites like OLX are the disruptors. The real disruptors are the care.com's, the airbnb's, and others who are bringing a great UI and social experience to a category and owning it.
fdschoeneman 16y ago
I'm certainly willing to concede that Craigslist has work to do in order to beat spammers and improve the usefulness of their product. But he has one core competitive advantage over his competition that, to my mind, trumps. That core advantage? I trust Craig Newmark, and I do not trust his competitors. I like his style. And as far as Kijiji goes, I wouldn't buy a ham sandwich from Meg Whitman.
gregkidd 16y ago
The site may be retro, but we think the data is great. Historically, its been hard to get and build on -- but we think it doesn't have to be that way because exchange postings are public facts and thus should be public propert that anyone can build on. Yahoo pipes was in theory a way of making this available for 3,000 developers -- but the RSS feeds were very incomplete and missed huge chunks of data becuase they are updated only every 15 minutes at most, and only for 100 postings at a time. When thousands of postings are streaming by, that's impossible to build something rigorous on top of. We've focused on creating a Craigslist firehose equivalent to the Twitter firehose so that the good data can be enjoyed by all, regardless of how you feel about the site. Its developer accessible at 3taps.com/developers, and the fruits of that access can be seen at craiggers.com. Bottom line is that regardless of how you feel about the site (which grosses MUCH more than $50M a year based on the stream of data we see), the data itself is pretty darned interesting.
huuleon 16y ago
Yes I totally agree why craigslist dominates the industry because of simplicity and ease of use for users. Craigslist has always been the place where i go first to look for used products especially cars. But there are two things i dislike about craigslist. One is sometimes you'll receive fishing emails asking you to reset password where you later noticed your computer is contain with viruses. Second, buying stuff on craigslist can be very time consuming especially with cars. You'll definitely have to travel multi times to different sellers before finding your ideal item. Plus the photos on craigslist are so low quality, you barely can see any scratches or damages. One time i had to traveled 2 hours to check out a car posted on craigslist then realized the seller lied to me which wasted 4 hrs of my time driving back and forth. So i started a website to help people buy and sell used stuff via videos instead of photos. I believe video is the best way to showcase something second hand online. It can save people so much time traveling to many places when they can instead watch it online without leaving the comfort of their homes. Although there are some disadvantages of using video to advertise your products but it can go a long way in the future as technologies increasingly advance. What do you think about the video concept? Can video replace photos for second hand market sometime in the near future? Leon- http://www.123exchanges.com http://www.123exchanges.com
- rhizome 16y ago
  Phishing emails are by no means restricted to Craigslist users, nor are they CL's responsibility. Should I complain to Chase bank that I received a phishing email in their guise?
MatthewDP 16y ago
This argument relies on Quantcast data that's not directly measured. When sites such as Compete, Quantcast and Alexa take a stab at measuring site traffic without direct measurement (like Google Analytics), the estimates they come up with are always way, way off. Unless there's better evidence that Craigslist traffic is declining, I don't buy it.
ericd 16y ago
This post is an example of the Silicon Valley echo chamber at its finest. With regards to the vertical sites eating their base, I call BS. Regular users who don't live on the internet can't/don't want to remember 50 different sites. The halo effect for a marketplace site like this is very strong. Craigslist is fighting extremely hard against spam, to the point where they're starting to make people jump through hoops by requiring phone numbers and texting confirmation codes for certain categories. They've even resorted to silent "hellban" style hiding for posts called "ghosting", which affects a lot of innocent posters in the housing categories. There's unfortunately a lot of money in scamming, so the scams keep coming despite all of this. The dip in traffic is pretty easily explainable by the banning of adult content, and I've never known Compete/Quantcast to be even within 3x of actual numbers, so using those as proof of anything is pretty dubious. This may be different on a site as large as CL, but even on sites with millions of monthly visitors, I've seen some laughably wrong numbers. RE: Craigslist not being "Social", what is more social than person-to-person selling? Does he just mean that they haven't put ugly buttons for x different social networks that their main constituency has never heard of? Craigslist is all about being useful and accessible, fad of the week be damned. Their design decisions have made it harder to do quality control, but it has made it accessible to people to whom posting on many of the sites you take for granted would be confusing. It's a tradeoff, and it has worked out wonderfully for them on the whole.
pbreit 16y ago
I hope people recognize that CL's continuing longevity is because of it's simplicity, not in spite of it.

218 points by rpsubhub 16y ago

I guess, but I've never heard of any of the things disrupting it, other than AirBnB. The apartment spam on Craigslist just means that it's harder to find an apartment, not that there is some other site to use.

notJim 16y ago
Surely you're exaggerating. You've never heard of Etsy, okcupid, PlentyofFish, StubHub, or CouchSurfing? CouchSurfing in particular is mentioned very often alongside AirBnB, and okcupid has had at least one front page story on HN this year (namely their acquisition.)
- _delirium 16y ago
  I might be an atypical user (?), but none of those sites appear to do the two things I and everyone else I know use Craigslist for: 1) buy/sell used goods; and 2) find long-term apartment rentals. For #1, eBay seems to be the only real competitor, and does non-shippable goods poorly (Ebay Classifieds has never really taken off). For #2, I don't really know of any (AirBnB and Couchsurfing are good for trips, but not really for finding somewhere to live).
  - notJim 16y ago
    I agree with you that none of these sites actually tackle the main uses of craigslist. I was merely questioning your assertion that you'd never heard of any of them :).

FirstHopSystems 16y ago

Good enough has been Craigslist biggest strength. You sure can innovate your self out of a good product, It does not always mean improvement. Disruption..I don't think so, competition yes. I'm pretty sure the use of disruption is getting diluted...... For the website It's not getting worse, that's a decent accomplishment for a website that's been around for such a long time. When Craigslist is dead and gone, then I think we can have a informed decision about Craigslist disrupted status.(Wait! Just checked.....still lots of postings)

staunch 16y ago

Housing and Jobs are probably 90% of Craigslist traffic (and 100% of revenue?). AirBnB is not even trying to be a replacement for Craigslist's housing section (and it isn't). It's a replacement for Hotels.com Indeed/SimplyHired are nothing more than modern day Monster.com/Dice.com. I also wouldn't take that Quantcast estimated chart at face value. It could easily be that even the trend is wrong and Craigslist is doing better than ever.

hansy 16y ago

"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site." Pretty sure Craig Newmark is a nonprofit sort of guy with perfunctory role in the company. Blame Jim Buckmaster for Craigslist's refusal to evolve.

dedward 16y ago
The only people who are in a position to lay any blame are the owners.... and we can be fairly certain the site is going in the direction they want it to.

CurrentB 16y ago

I wonder how much of this disruption can be attributed to the removal of the erotic ads section. You can see a major slowing of momentum around the time they were taken down (May '09). I mean that was an area without any major competition and which I'm sure accounted for TONS of traffic.

naner 16y ago

I am actually really glad Craigslist doesn't try to Buzz or #Dickbar itself and doesn't have those obnoxious social buttons/plugins all over the place. Newmark just wants to maintain a useful simple site. That's why Craigslist will be around forever, he doesn't spring unwelcome surprises on his userbase. Also Craigslist probably gets used more heavily when the economy isn't doing so well. I'm not sure his magical line graph is as predictive as he imagines.

nir 16y ago

>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling. I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.

georgieporgie 16y ago
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users. I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.
- rhizome 16y ago
  It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
  - brianpan 16y ago
    I'd say the flag help forum (and the help forums in general) are prime examples of "consistently awful, frustrating experience".
  - georgieporgie 16y ago
    It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.

jackmanbob 16y ago

>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site. In ten years I think Craigslist will be an afterthought..." If I were pocketing $50M per year for 10 years, I wouldn't give a damn if the site wasn't around at the end.

dpcan 16y ago

Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist. Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way. It was perfect.

originalgeek 16y ago
And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off. However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Google search for something like "Craigslist ad not showing up". Then there was the merry-go-round of pathetic employees I was trying to hire for the unskilled jobs in my warehouse. But that was back in 2008, before the bubble burst. The quality of the applicants I found in my more recent go at it was greatly improved. But the frustration now was 300 resumes showing up in my inbox in 12 hours, and sifting that down to 10 people to interview I guess I should not complain about that, it is a little frustrating though. The bottom line is Craigslist will always be around because it works, and it works anywhere. There isn't any limited deployment like some of these startups that are piloting in 2 cities. And probably won't go nationwide for a long time, if at all. From what I read here on HN, the name of the game is for the startups to make the big sale and founders glide away on their golden parachutes, then the buyer crashes the company into the ground.
- adammichaelc 16y ago
  Had to look that one up. Pretty circular definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/iphone/#define?term=ghosted http://www.urbandictionary.com/iphone/#define?term=ghosted
  - originalgeek 16y ago
    It's Craigslist jargon. I learned it off the forums I was lucky enough to accidentally stumble into.

aresant 16y ago

As a business in 2010 CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads, and 17% from rentals. The adult ads went out the window which is going to hurt them, a LOT, in terms of both traffic and revenue. So the more material question is has CL's largest revenue category - job's - been disrupted? I was able to dig up this graph of job mention volume and it appears that CL, in their most important category, is gaining velocity, not slowing down: http://www.jobgoround.com/tools/craigslist-job-trends/ http://www.jobgoround.com/tools/craigslist-job-trends/ (set to one year) and http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Craigslist http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Craigslist Reference for percentage of revenues: http://www.ere.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-2010-revenue.jpg http://www.ere.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-201...

extension 16y ago
CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads Not surprising, as those are markets with a supply-demand imbalance. These seem to gravitate towards marketplaces that require lots of hoop jumping, I guess because it artificially pares down the demand.
dennisgorelik 16y ago
It does not look like number of job postings on CraigsList grew much. Number of job postings overall on all web sites in the last grew more than on CraigsList (due to recovering economy).

turar 16y ago

Funny, seems that the author of the image in the article only uses "adult" and "rants and raves" categories on Craigslist. :)

scrod 16y ago
A relevant comment from the post: >You might want to put lines on that graph showing that Craigslist was sued for its adult classifieds on May 4th and removed the section on September 4th. One could argue that the disruption has primarily occurred because of those events.

dman 16y ago

gnu grep disrupted, folks using new fangled Google instead. Craiglist is a great, stable design that works with a uniform interface to do common transactions that occur in most peoples lives. Can they be outpaced within a vertical? Sure, but their USP lies in the newspaper classifieds that they sought to displace originally. Until someone else comes up with a better catch all for real life transactions that is more economical and convenient, I wouldnt consider craigslist disrupted.

carlosag 16y ago

I completely agree with Josh that there is a gap in functionality that needs to be filled. I often hear the argument that I should be grateful for this free online service... Poppycock! My attention on the internet is worth something. Especially for such a profitable industry as classifieds. If I'm looking for a house on the internet I want to be able to zoom into a certain area on a map and click 'refresh' to see all the relevant rentals with little pins on the map. This is not rocket science. Craigslist has a rich database and could make it far more useful and user friendly. There is something to be said for simple and minimalist design. Craigslist, however seems 'not designed' at all with little regard for making things easy to find or relevant.

dedward 16y ago
So somoene is free to go out and fill it - craigslist is under no obligation to do this. They're private. They can do what they want. Just because a whole LOT of people would love to get their hands on it because they think they could make billions off it or monetize it better doesn't turn it into an obligation. Craigslist is what it is - and if Newmark is pulling in 50 million a year off it, for all this time, he's probably not all that concerned if the site dwindles out over the next half a decade, if it does that. Unless he has a horrid gambling habit he's probably sitting awfully pretty right about now. Nobody's forcing you to use craigslist. If you have a better site out there, go use it. IF you think you can do better, try pitching it to them. IF you just want to whine that it's not as good as it could be and you aren't satisfied as a customer... wait.. you aren't a customer. Nevermind. Craigslist is doing fine without you.
ericd 16y ago
Try PadMapper. That kind of interface probably wouldn't work very well at Craigslist's scale, though, with their headcount.

bigwally 16y ago

Dealing with Craigslist in NY I found it to be full of scammers and spammers. Buying from people listing on craigslist is very much a buyer beware experience. Plenty of bait and switch. And my personal favorite "It's currently in pieces, you can pay me and take the pieces away. All the pieces are there but you have to pay cash first." Craigslist has a lot of room for improvement and it would great to see useful changes made.

rick888 16y ago
This is one of the biggest problems: no feedback system for accounts. Since there is almost no barrier to entry, it's really easy for scammers.

protomyth 16y ago

What's wrong with just being a stable place? Why does everything have to evolve? Craigslist works fine for a lot of people. It is familiar, doesn't hog bandwidth, and doesn't leak personal information like a sieve. Sometimes a hammer just needs to keep being a hammer.

kj12345 16y ago
Great point. I think this concept of "disruption" is out of place anyway when the existing site is mostly free and works fine on mobile devices. You might be able to steal traffic bit by bit by doing a better job, but there's nothing to really disrupt in a dramatic way.

calloc 16y ago

So Craigslist is supposedly being disrupted by all of these startups that are taking over various parts of what Craigslist does, and yet I don't know any of those competitors. When I am looking for something cheap, I go to Craigslist. I don't want to have to remember 10 - 20 different site names because of different categories. That in and of itself is a great plus to Craigslist. It's all there when you get to the page...

diego 16y ago
We have remote employees that come to San Francisco for 1-4 weeks at a time. We used to find temporary places for them on Craigslist. AirBnB is much more helpful.

bandushrew 16y ago

This graph: http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd771cb9c9a0d126d0af76 http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd7... is showing exactly the reason Craigslist is doing well. Each of the alternatives displayed represents a specialized, vertical solution for just one (or a couple) of the categories offered by Craigslist, There is no way that Craigslist could compete head to head with every one of them anyway, at best they could choose a couple of categories and build new products focused on them. Instead they are choosing to be a general platform. Nothing lasts forever, and no doubt Craigslist will fade away over time, as will facebook, myspace and Windows itself, but in the meantime they are pretty well positioned, providing a 'good enough' solution for a wide range of categories is just as reasonable as providing a targetted solution to a specific category. What they would absolutely fail to do is provide an excellent vertical solution for every category they offer, Which means those competitors on that graph would still exist even if Craigslist improved its site, and probably they would still be doing well.

rgarcia 16y ago
I completely agree. I'm surprised at the level of negativity towards CL here. I would expect a community of hackers to recognize a highly generic solution like CL when they see one. The only critique I would give is that if CL were really trying to be a generic platform that does a decent job at solving a myriad of problems, then they should open themselves up and have an official API. Right now all of the CL mashups do some kind of scraping to get their data.
pdaviesa 16y ago
You know, that's a really good point. I may go straight to StubHub if I'm really into seeing ballgames, but am I really going to remember the hot new startups focusing on apartment rentals, spa services, or used car parts? No, I'm just going to Craigslist for any of my peripheral needs.
- ericd 16y ago
  Exactly, the inability to remember 50 specialized marketplaces means that CL's position is pretty much secure.

tokenadult 16y ago

As an outsider looking in, I'm wondering to what degree the comments posted here on HN about Facebook (that it is full of people who don't tell the truth and who try to scam for monetary advantage) report a fact of human nature that might eventually disrupt Quora? What is Quora's defense against turning into a place with rather low-quality posts as soon as it attracts a lot of eyeballs?

jjhjh 16y ago

Who cares? It's Craig's list, not your list. He can do whatever the hell he wants with it. In addition I get the impression most people here who lambast CL as being full of spam live in areas that CL is not thriving in. Ask a New Yorker or a Bay Area resident about how useful CL is and then rethink your perspective. CL works. It gets the job done. 'Nuff said.

Gaussian 16y ago

Simply plotting their apartments or stuff for sale on a map would make a big difference in ease of use. A YC company, Padmapper, does this for you, but why doesn't CL see this as utterly necessary? Searching for something, be it an oak table or a house rental, is exasperating. Realtor.com, a site that's totally behind, got on the mapping thing more than a year ago. Amazing that CL hasn't done the same.

originalgeek 16y ago
I dunno, it's pretty effective to narrow one's search by the part of town you're looking in, for example, in L.A. you can break it down by Central L.A., SF Valley, SG Valley, etc. and then search by city name. Click the map link to see where the exact location is. It's really not that hard. Found my current jewel of a home that way.
tsuyoshi 16y ago
Maybe CL looks at Padmapper and thinks "oh great, somebody else did it and now we don't have to".

extension 16y ago

Here is why Craigslist was so successful in the first place: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

nfriedly 16y ago

Is there anything better than CL for apartments in the SF area? RentHop (in the graphic in the article) looks like it's NYC only. I'm looking at a move to San Mateo this summer and every "apartment finder" website I've tried has been a pitiful experience.

jarek 16y ago
Take a look at padmapper - it's craigslist apartments data with filtering and on a map.
- nfriedly 16y ago
  I'll check it out - thanks.
- nihaar 16y ago
  May I recommend MapThatPad as well to store your results

drallison 16y ago

I, for one, prefer the no-frills Craigslist approach to any of the competitors.

mikiem 16y ago

Don't underestimate the beauty that is the cash cow.

tsotha 16y ago
Seriously. How many sites have gone the way of Digg, innovating their way into obscurity? If CL is still on top after all these years they're doing something right, even if that something is... nothing.

kristofferR 16y ago

The sad thing is that it would be quite easy to drastically improve Craigslist. First, a simple CSS and design cleanup like this one: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigslist7_f.jpg http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigsl... No drastic changes, just a cleanup. Then you add an advanced search tool with maps and filtering based on some criterias like distance and price. Then there's issue of spam. Solve these three issues, and CL is basically "fixed".

slyall 16y ago

Now I realise that everybody here lives in CA or NY but there are plenty of places around the world where craigslist never took off. http://sydney.craigslist.com.au/apa/ http://sydney.craigslist.com.au/apa/ http://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/ http://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/ http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/ http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/ http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/ http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/ and it's interesting that: http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/ http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/ seems to have ads all in English.

bugsy 16y ago

I don't know. The author states that CL is a bad site as if it is an accepted fact. He doesn't make a case for it he just starts with it as an axiom. Why does he assume this? Maybe it doesn't have enough flash, or css shadows or what? CL is a great site that does exactly what people expect of it. You post classified ads in your local market and people get in touch with you. It is a web based classified ad and it works. When I want to buy something used locally and am not in a hurry I look through CL. Right now there is no other site organized to do this that works and is available in every market. Why should there be? CL works fine. Because it's free it killed off newspaper classifieds but so what. Their bitter and angry competitors have to resort to dirty tricks like trying to get the police and FBI to investigate CL, which shows how desperate and out of ideas the competition is.

itgoon 16y ago

I have no problem with this. He doesn't need to re-invest - he's the only investor (more or less). As was pointed out, there's other sites which do a better job, so if you don't like it, don't use it. Mr. Newmark and his staff are well-off with little effort. Even if they lose 90% of their revenue, we're still talking millions. Heck, that's brilliant.

vaksel 16y ago

craigslist won't be disrupted for the simple reason because they have a ton of traffic...UI etc, is pointless for classifieds since the only thing people care about is whether or not the service has buyers/sellers for the things they want...and Craigslist has that in spades. i.e. I recently listed a car for sale on craigslist...listed it on Friday evening and got 8 interested people in a few hours, and it sold the next day.

far33d 16y ago
I'm sure there's someone who said that about newspaper classifieds once too.
- vaksel 16y ago
  newspaper classifieds didn't have the traffic in a single location

nicelios 16y ago

Despite these disruptions, the company is unparalleled from a profit-per-employee perspective. Craiglist's network effect may have reached its limit, but the company will continue to make huge profits. They clearly favor maintenance over product development, but that doesn't diminish their status as a profit-per-employee anomaly.

d2 16y ago

The graph is US traffic only and they peaked at 16.6% of the entire US population visiting the site once a month. Google called this the "law of large numbers" in 2006 when they predicted a slowing in their growth and Microsoft did the same a long time ago when they hit saturation. The drop is only during the last 6 months, is less than 10% and could be a variety of factors including a stats gathering quirk, recession, etc.

donniefitz2 16y ago

Craig's List can be enhanced. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.

rickyjoshi01 16y ago

The problem with the article is that it believes that sites like OLX are the disruptors. The real disruptors are the care.com's, the airbnb's, and others who are bringing a great UI and social experience to a category and owning it.

fdschoeneman 16y ago

I'm certainly willing to concede that Craigslist has work to do in order to beat spammers and improve the usefulness of their product. But he has one core competitive advantage over his competition that, to my mind, trumps. That core advantage? I trust Craig Newmark, and I do not trust his competitors. I like his style. And as far as Kijiji goes, I wouldn't buy a ham sandwich from Meg Whitman.

gregkidd 16y ago

The site may be retro, but we think the data is great. Historically, its been hard to get and build on -- but we think it doesn't have to be that way because exchange postings are public facts and thus should be public propert that anyone can build on. Yahoo pipes was in theory a way of making this available for 3,000 developers -- but the RSS feeds were very incomplete and missed huge chunks of data becuase they are updated only every 15 minutes at most, and only for 100 postings at a time. When thousands of postings are streaming by, that's impossible to build something rigorous on top of. We've focused on creating a Craigslist firehose equivalent to the Twitter firehose so that the good data can be enjoyed by all, regardless of how you feel about the site. Its developer accessible at 3taps.com/developers, and the fruits of that access can be seen at craiggers.com. Bottom line is that regardless of how you feel about the site (which grosses MUCH more than $50M a year based on the stream of data we see), the data itself is pretty darned interesting.

huuleon 16y ago

Yes I totally agree why craigslist dominates the industry because of simplicity and ease of use for users. Craigslist has always been the place where i go first to look for used products especially cars. But there are two things i dislike about craigslist. One is sometimes you'll receive fishing emails asking you to reset password where you later noticed your computer is contain with viruses. Second, buying stuff on craigslist can be very time consuming especially with cars. You'll definitely have to travel multi times to different sellers before finding your ideal item. Plus the photos on craigslist are so low quality, you barely can see any scratches or damages. One time i had to traveled 2 hours to check out a car posted on craigslist then realized the seller lied to me which wasted 4 hrs of my time driving back and forth. So i started a website to help people buy and sell used stuff via videos instead of photos. I believe video is the best way to showcase something second hand online. It can save people so much time traveling to many places when they can instead watch it online without leaving the comfort of their homes. Although there are some disadvantages of using video to advertise your products but it can go a long way in the future as technologies increasingly advance. What do you think about the video concept? Can video replace photos for second hand market sometime in the near future? Leon- http://www.123exchanges.com http://www.123exchanges.com

rhizome 16y ago
Phishing emails are by no means restricted to Craigslist users, nor are they CL's responsibility. Should I complain to Chase bank that I received a phishing email in their guise?

MatthewDP 16y ago

This argument relies on Quantcast data that's not directly measured. When sites such as Compete, Quantcast and Alexa take a stab at measuring site traffic without direct measurement (like Google Analytics), the estimates they come up with are always way, way off. Unless there's better evidence that Craigslist traffic is declining, I don't buy it.

ericd 16y ago

This post is an example of the Silicon Valley echo chamber at its finest. With regards to the vertical sites eating their base, I call BS. Regular users who don't live on the internet can't/don't want to remember 50 different sites. The halo effect for a marketplace site like this is very strong. Craigslist is fighting extremely hard against spam, to the point where they're starting to make people jump through hoops by requiring phone numbers and texting confirmation codes for certain categories. They've even resorted to silent "hellban" style hiding for posts called "ghosting", which affects a lot of innocent posters in the housing categories. There's unfortunately a lot of money in scamming, so the scams keep coming despite all of this. The dip in traffic is pretty easily explainable by the banning of adult content, and I've never known Compete/Quantcast to be even within 3x of actual numbers, so using those as proof of anything is pretty dubious. This may be different on a site as large as CL, but even on sites with millions of monthly visitors, I've seen some laughably wrong numbers. RE: Craigslist not being "Social", what is more social than person-to-person selling? Does he just mean that they haven't put ugly buttons for x different social networks that their main constituency has never heard of? Craigslist is all about being useful and accessible, fad of the week be damned. Their design decisions have made it harder to do quality control, but it has made it accessible to people to whom posting on many of the sites you take for granted would be confusing. It's a tradeoff, and it has worked out wonderfully for them on the whole.

pbreit 16y ago

I hope people recognize that CL's continuing longevity is because of it's simplicity, not in spite of it.