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Craigslist dominates apartment rental advertising. Landlords post to CL because that's where the renters are looking, and renters look on CL because that's wher
by cwp 14y ago
Craigslist dominates apartment rental advertising. Landlords post to CL because that's where the renters are looking, and renters look on CL because that's where landlords post apartments. But CL does have competitors. Lots of sites want a piece of that business, they just can't overcome the network effect that protects Craigslist.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of pads on Padmapper are Craigslist posts. But that's just because the overwhelming majority of all advertised apartments are Craigslist posts. If people start using Padmapper in large numbers, it breaks the symmetry of CL's dominance. Landlords are still posting to CL, but renters are finding those posts through Padmapper. It won't be long before landlords realize that those renters will also find posts on Kijiji or Apartments.com or whatever. When that happen's CL is in trouble, because it's revenue comes from landlords in certain cities paying to post.
CL doesn't care about the TOS per se; the TOS are designed to prevent just such a scenario.
- genwin 14y agoThat makes great sense. I hadn't seen that angle.
- intended 14y agoI'm curious - what was the end game for the padmapper and CL relationship that you foresaw? And by extension - the relation between CL and many other people who want to disintermediate CL away? Genuinely curious.
- genwin 14y agoJust thinking "out loud" here, it seems CL would need to stop others from using their data derived from Google or other search engines. If they can legally do that at relatively low cost, they would. Alternatively, if I was Craig, I'd have to seriously consider disallowing well-behaved search bots from scanning CL data. As a moderate user of CL I've never found a CL item through Google; after all, ads are good for only a week. I don't see a big loss to CL by cutting off Google/Bing etc.