7 ms·

That's like saying that cars have cost horse carriage manufacturers $X billion. What a silly statement.

• dmak 13y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  Except less useful, unless I missed the part where horse carriages had been in decline for years before cars existed because the dominant producers engaged in a series of corporate mergers and cost-cutting moves that stripped out the main customer value from the product. America's newspapers (particularly the big dailies) had been destroying themselves since about the early 1980s; the decline was well-known, and often discussed long before it started to be blamed on competition from the internet in general or Craigslist in particular.
• kansface 13y ago
  Its entirely reasonable to claim CL has transformed a billion dollar business into a million dollar business of which it (as a company) is the sole beneficiary. For quite some time, Newspapers and the like have not sold news- they sell used cars and real estate. Quantifying the actual numbers if valuable.
  • GuiA 13y ago
    It's reasonable to say that they have transformed the market, but saying they have "cost" them anything is an ill choice of words.
  • smokeyj 13y ago
    > CL has transformed a billion dollar business into a million dollar business of which it (as a company) is the sole beneficiary And of course the value added to CL's users and the many markets it facilitates..
• ams6110 13y ago
  Cars offered many advantages over horse carriages, enough that people were willing to pay for cars. Craigslist offered one main advantage over newspaper classifieds: they were free. It's hard to compete with free on something like a classified ad. If CL had charged anything close to newspaper market rates for ads, they would not have had nearly the market penetration.
  • GuiA 13y ago
    And if newspaper ads were free, Craigslist wouldn't be where it is today. With ifs and buts we can change the world :)