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> [AirBnB] absolve themselves of costs, growth time, investment into that growth, location issues, the works That makes them much more easy to replace with a c

• _delirium 13y ago
  It's surprisingly hard to displace companies with significant network effects even if they have no technology to speak of, pay little attention to the market or users, or really do anything else except exist with a large market share. See: eBay, Craigslist. Closer to AirBnB's niche (since I see AirBnB as essentially "Couchsurfing for money"), Couchsurfing has also persisted despite taking the initial community organization private, which resulted in much of its initial active community leaving, and not really improving the site much since then... because it's Couchsurfing, the site identified with a verb that refers to a particular kind of travel. (Large parts of the initial community founded BeWelcome, fwiw, which is a less-successful fork, though it has moderate traction.) It's possible to lose a big lead (see: MySpace), but a company that is popularly identified with a particular niche can coast for a really long time without doing much to deserve it.
  • XorNot 13y ago
    AirBnb won't be replaced, it'll be made illegal. It's exploiting - in a significant way - something which was already illegal in a lot of places, or certainly skirting neighborhood ettiquette (i.e. not illegal, but do it enough and there'd be good reasons to make it so). It runs the very serious risk that there'll be crackdowns in popular cities on AirBnb style subletting, and once that happens their income base is only going to go into decline from then on out.
    • _delirium 13y ago
      Some of it is, yes. It's combining a number of markets, though. The most problematic is people who are basically running classic, 1920s-flophouse-style, unlicensed and uninspected hotels in places like NYC. I would guess those will eventually be cracked down on. But there are two other big categories. The second is the "couchsurfing for money", people who really are renting out a spare couch or spare bedroom. These are also often illegal, but at least if they do it less often than "always", and fairly discreetly, are much less likely to run into trouble than the person running a full-fledged flophouse operation. The third category are people running fully licensed vacation rentals. AirBnB has somewhat accidentally captured a good portion of this market as well, in large part because its competitors in much of the world range from poor to "don't have an English website" to nonexistent. I rented a house in Crete in this category last year; it was a place that otherwise you could rent directly or via a travel agency, but I only found it via AirBnB because their internet presence apart from AirBnB was poor. I think even in the U.S., which has VRBO as the incumbent, AirBnB is picking up some of this business.
    • JohnTHaller 13y ago
      Whole apartment rentals of less than 30 days are already illegal here in NYC unless you have the proper licensing. I think only around 1% of the Airbnb whole apartment listings have said licensing. So everything else on there is an illegal temporary sublet. Note that I do have a friend who operates on Airbnb in NYC and has the proper licensing.
• tedivm 13y ago
  But a competitor would have to add something else on top of it to get over the existing brand awareness of AirBnB. Everyone knows AirBnB and it's hard to shake up the incumbents without something innovative.