I'm a huge fan of the fact that Craigslist is on a list of products from the past. Subtle, but necessary dig at Craigslist.
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Craiglist is a classified advertisement website with sections devoted to jobs, housing,personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, resumes and discussion forums. Craig Newmark thought of a way to make newspaper classified ad listings simple, and in turn, people’s lives easier began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and currently covers 50 countries.
Craigslist's main source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities – $75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Orange County (California) and Portland, Oregon – and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad) and $5 to $10 for therapeutic services ads, which have taken in some of the refugees from the shuttered adult services. Last publicly known sources of revenues were $115 million in 2011 with close to 40 employees.With over 80 million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over 2 million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.The 23 largest U.S. cities listed on the Craigslist home page collectively receive more than 300,000 postings per day just in the ""for sale"" and ""housing” sections.(as of Oct 2011).
Craigslist has taken this "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" attitude to an extreme. Although it has made small changes to things like the way images are displayed in listings, Craigslist is virtually indistinguishable from its early days, remaining a text-dense translation of the classifieds section in the newspaper.That one innovation bringing classifieds online has worked for an amazingly long time.Its simplicity, critical-mass and community-aided administration are what have kept Craigslist at the top, undisrupted.Craigslist = Simple + Free + Network effects + Anonymous. It's very, very hard to compete with something that gets the job done well enough and is free.
Disruption has happened but occurred on a category-by-category bases, For the most part Craigslist is being disrupted through companies in other verticals rather than a direct blow. It's unlikely a general marketplace will get traction. The best way to attack Craigslist is to go after vertical niches and provide a quality of service that a general classifieds site cannot hope to match. Many start-ups have disrupted Craigslist in a handful of vertical categories, but no one has come close to offering a one-stop place to find whatever you want, or sell whatever you don't. Checkout this image which shows the different startups that are trying to take on craiglist across different verticals.
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