
Craigslist has been disrupted - rpsubhub
http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-another-product-disrupted-and-replaced-Craigslist/answer/Josh-Hannah
======
nir
_> "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.

~~~
danilocampos
The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the
fact that craigslist is a terrible product.

It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource
their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation
mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's
either spam or a scam.

Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade.
craigslist remains in 2001. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is
miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very
basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.

craigslist can keep its hideous, serifed-out visual design as long as it
wants. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks – it's _how it works_.

The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump
in your shoes every day.

~~~
Klinky
_Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are
almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is
communicated by people listing their properties._

Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites
that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info
ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...

~~~
danilocampos
A nit to pick, since elai has already provided some good examples.

> Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier...

None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance
reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem.
craigslist _doesn't work well_. I don't want it to look different. I want it
to work differently.

A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist and still work no
better.

~~~
18pfsmt
My buddy is 40 years old, not very technical, but he's one hell of a mechanic.
He's been making his living off buying and selling cars off of CL since the
recession started. Just an anecdote. I'm not sure an "improved UI" would help
him. So many entrepreneurs are mad at CL for whatever reason, but the main one
seems to be jealousy. They would rather ruin it than allow it to continue.

~~~
reedlaw
I found that nearly every used car I looked at on CL was either being resold
by small-time "car dealers" or bought up by these same people. It was nearly
impossible to find a good used car so I finally leased a new one instead.

------
dpcan
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.

~~~
heyitsnick
From the top answer:

"if I'm looking to rent an apartment, it would be nice not to see the same
listing reposted every day, and having to re-read it and figure out if I've
called them before. It might be even nicer to view them on a map, or god
forbid have new and relevant listing emailed to me."

Is that not broken? Sure sounds it to me.

I had my first experience of using AirBNB today. From start to finish it was
an absolute pleasure; a real example of using some of theis "web 2.0" tech to
provide a better experience to the user, and ultimately connect buyer to
seller more efficiently. Excellent search experience, great integration with
maps, ajax where it made sense, crowd sourcing was useful (feedback).

I don't know too much about the space but by the popularity of airbnb it
certainly seems like it is disrupting at least one part of the space
craigslist has historically occupied.

~~~
rhizome
It's not broken, the apartment shopper is broken for not taking their own
notes! Jeez, does Craigslist have to make up for _everybody's_ personal
failings?

I've heard of PLENTY of frustrated attempts to use Airbnb, enough that I would
not use them without a Craigslist-level of (caveat-) emptorial vigilance. I
wouldn't call your experience with them to be unbelievable, but Airbnb has not
solved the Craigslist "random scammer" problem by any means.

------
bandushrew
This graph:

[http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-
qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd7...](http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-
qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd771cb9c9a0d126d0af76)

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.

~~~
pdaviesa
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
Exactly, the inability to remember 50 specialized marketplaces means that CL's
position is pretty much secure.

------
naner
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.

------
protomyth
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
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.

------
aresant
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/> (set to one year)

and <http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/trend/q-Craigslist>

Reference for percentage of revenues: [http://www.ere.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-201...](http://www.ere.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/04/Craigslist-2010-revenue.jpg)

~~~
extension
_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.

------
calloc
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
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.

------
CurrentB
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.

------
jrockway
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
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
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
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 :).

------
bugsy
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.

------
tokenadult
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?

------
ericd
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.

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

~~~
scrod
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._

------
FirstHopSystems
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)

------
dman
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.

------
gregkidd
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.

------
itgoon
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.

------
slyall
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://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/>
<http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/> <http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/>

and it's interesting that:

<http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/>

seems to have ads all in English.

------
huuleon
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>

~~~
rhizome
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?

------
kristofferR
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_craigsl...](http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigslist7_f.jpg)

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".

------
staunch
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.

------
jjhjh
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.

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

------
d2
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.

------
Gaussian
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
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.

------
fdschoeneman
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.

------
MatthewDP
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.

------
nicelios
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.

------
hansy
"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
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.

------
nfriedly
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
Take a look at padmapper - it's craigslist apartments data with filtering and
on a map.

~~~
nihaar
May I recommend MapThatPad as well to store your results

------
rickyjoshi01
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.

------
carlosag
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
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.

------
extension
Here is why Craigslist was so successful in the first place:

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>

------
vaksel
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
I'm sure there's someone who said that about newspaper classifieds once too.

~~~
vaksel
newspaper classifieds didn't have the traffic in a single location

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

~~~
tsotha
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.

------
pbreit
I hope people recognize that CL's continuing longevity is _because_ of it's
simplicity, not _in spite_ of it.

------
donniefitz2
Craig's List can be enhanced. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.

------
bigwally
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
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.

