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Why Craigslist Is Successful
I found this link in the Union Square Ventures weblog comments section.
It's an analysis of why Craigslist works. And its a good read.
My favorite part:
Craigslist is brilliant because his main activity is something that posters are inherently promiscuous with -- personal spamming. In any other context, the bulk of the material on Craigslist would be considered spam. In my email box, on another message forum, heck even on one of google's spam-ridden Blogger sites. The posts are the equivalent of those indiscriminately posted flyers on corkboards at universities.
Buy my mattress..need a ride to Chicago...come see my band. People put these flyers up fully expecting only a handful to see or care about them enough to rip off a tab with the phone number at the bottom. The expectation of response is low but it's cheap to try.
Now Craig's lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob Nielsen. You can't have a pulldown with 160 things in it. Half of your users wouldn't get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it's not a pull-down. Half of the entire homepage is a giant selector devoted to classifying posts.
Craigslist is personally tagged spam. Interesting observation.
Comments (4) | Posted June 14, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
The definition of spam is it is untargeted and sent indiscriminantly.
I'm not sure a hierarchical tree of pull advertising really counts as spam. To see an craigslist ad I have to overtly navigate to it, meaning it is not sent indiscriminantly. To facilitate that navigation the ads are structured in an ontology, this is the targeting.
Spam is defined by context. So a statement like "In any other context, the bulk of the material on Craigslist would be considered spam" doesn't really mean much.
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Jun 14, 2006 9:02:08 AM
I found the meeting with Craig both fascinating and revealing, as much for what he didn't say as for what he did. I'd pick two primary reasons for Craigslist's success:
1. Free classifieds has been a killer model on the web. Craigslist started early with this model and stuck at it, with little competition. Did anyone else have a serious go at this? Headhunter.net was a very successful free job board, but they sold out to Careerbuilder. Even today, Craigslist is only monetizing a small segment of its service.
2. Passionate customer service. Of Craigslist's 20 or so employees, a full 5 or 6 are dedicated to customer service, according to Craig. But it's customer service with a difference - they actually follow through. In other words, the content and features of the service evolve iteratively through committed communication with their users. As Craig himself said: 'we keep thinking of ourselves as a community service and it seems to work'.
But, what of the future? Is *free* enough? Vertical search makes it possible for users to conduct comprehensive searches of millions classified listings from thousands of sources and for advertisers to post just to a single place (such as their own websites). The walled garden - quo vadis?
Posted by: Paul | Jun 14, 2006 11:14:06 AM
One man's spam is another man's treasure. So it goes to prove that intention and context are more important than content.
Posted by: Jerry | Jun 14, 2006 11:31:30 AM
I thought you considered spammers equivalent to rapists and murderers.
Posted by: Dave | Jun 14, 2006 12:59:40 PM
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