Ask YC: Why can't anyone compete with craigslist?
I can't figure out why no one has become a serious threat to craigslist. No one has even made a dent in the craigslist market share. Why?
You say that like it's not a big deal. It's 8 am in Honolulu, one of the smaller cl cities, and there are 200 cars posted today. There's no way to search by year, blue book, mileage, etc, all of which are (generally) possible with the existing data. I think craigslist could be much more useful.
The biggest thing holding them back is their uncharacteristic resistance to mashups. I strongly believe they're working against their own aims (public service) in shutting down services that scrape their data.
To summarize:
Search is key. CL are a non-player in our market, but the CL equivalent cannot compete with us in automotive.
Why? High quality reference data, the kind that means you can't add a 1999 Ford Pinto CL if no such thing exists, and if it did exist we know it came with an iPod dock, is reasonably expensive to create and maintain and generalist just don't have the focus.
High quality reference data leads to high quality search, where you search for 2007 Ford X and get only '07 Ford X' or you search for late model BMW's between $25k and $33k and get exactly those, tends to deliver high quality buyers. Search quality and lead quality are inextricably linked. Sellers tend to follow high quality buyers.
I don't know how CL fares vertical for vertical, but I'd be quite surprised if in most markets they were the #1 player in each vertical.
It's not an aggregator, its value lies in the fact that it has tremendous brand recognition far more than the sheer volume of data it has.
The craigslist folks could sell the company in the blink of an eye. The amount for which they could sell it is continually increasing.
It's great that its so expansive, and search is ok - but sometimes while scouring it, you come up with little gems that make you go "oh wow"...
If you could create something that would give you more "oh wow" moments, I think you'd have enough of a disruptive technology to draw away some of their users.
The most important feature of a classifieds site is cost to reach audience X. At this point, it is probably impossible to compete with Craigslist on that metric.
Why not target a city other than SF or NY..
melbourne.craigslist.com.au looks pretty dead to me... (And melbourne is about 600k people larger than the SF urban area)
I'll offer up one advance it could make. I'd like to click on a map and see all available apartments near my click. People lie about what "Park Slope" means and it's a waste of my time.
I'm not looking for someone to tell me what the next big thing would be. I'm just trying to understand why no major innovation has had any market pull at all. There must be a classified killer floating around out there.
This is called "barrier to entry".
Windows XP is clearly not the end-all of operating systems. But their competition is a rounding error on the market. They've needed an absolutely brilliant opponent and a historic internal fuckup for there to even be competition. And the network effect for operating systems is lower than for Craigslist: a vendor can spend their way into the OS/ISV game.
Why aren't more startups trying to work with Craigslist? Of all the 800lb gorillas in the world, Craigslist seems the most amenable.
As PG would say, Google beat out Yahoo, Altavista, Excite by improving something that wasn't as good as it could be.
BUT, your question about why people don't work with CL is an interesting one. I don't recall ever seeing a way to get at their data aside from screen scraping...
At this point in the game, something like Google or Yahoo goes far beyond a search engine... Email, calendars, ad networks, analytics, etc.. All these things combined make it so much harder to walk away (theres your network effect). I personally couldn't leave Google. They house to much of the information and tools I use on a daily basis, it wouldn't even be worth the effort at this point. The "new" offering would have to be huge.
Ebay is an innovation in buying selling stuff (once classifieds territory).
Personally, I think maps/real-estate, very possibly from Google could be a major point of attack. just makes sense to find real estate on a map. Also makes sense to book hotels. 2 money areas online.
At flugpo we are building a craigslist competitor that has better everything. But it's hard to get a large foothold anywhere with out being able to focus on a market and work at it for a long time.
In other words, it's not sufficient enough to say, "Somebody could easily build a better-looking Craiglist". Users aren't willing to post or browse classifieds on a site that may look nicer by doesn't have the same reach.
Likewise, it's not sufficient to offer a site that has "modern" (Web 2.0) tools. Again, that doesn't help users with their primary objective: getting their ad in front of as many people as possible.
So does Craiglist even have an Achilles' Heel then? In my opinion, the one thing that absolutely sucks about posting an ad to Craiglist is getting a ton of flakey or illegible responses from people who are just wasting your time. I don't bother to post small items there anymore because it's just not worth the trouble. If someone could develop a site that filters out all the flakes, I bet you'd have a compelling reason for people to start using it.
Do to Craigslist what slinkset does to reddit. Go after a thousand niche markets. Craigslist lets you suggest new locations but that's about it. But there's no reason every small town/organization/hobby/school/company shouldn't be able to have it's own classifieds website.
Craigslist is the ultimate "free and useful" site. But it does a lot.
Dating sites, in particular, outdo Craigslist for personals pretty routinely. OKCupid and PlentyOfFish are almost as free (they have ads), but are much less spammy. (CL's w4m boards are pretty much 100% spam. The others aren't much better. Actually, I'm not sure why they even continue to keep them up.)
The last time I sold a car, and the last time I bought one, I did use CL pretty aggressively, but the actual deal I ended up making was through Autotrader both times.
So, it's possible to compete with Craigslist in specific areas, but it's a bit foolish to try to be the "all forms of classified", since they do THAT pretty damn well. They've stripped down the feature set to the point where it's just what is necessary, and nothing else. Not a bad strategy. (Arguably, the only one that really works.)
The trick is to find something where CL is the best of breed, and figure out the pain points. If the answer is "there aren't any pain points", then move on to the next idea.
My thought is that it will happen in time if they don't adapt and modernize, but they have a great hold right now.
They were backed by a large news corporation, so that probably helped. The corporation really didn't want to look too much at classifieds on the internet, since they had a paper business to protect. That's why they waited until 2000 before the site was released.
When it comes to real estate, I think they have close to 100% of the market. Only real estate agents are allowed to post ads, and I think they pay a lot to do so.
They are also huge in the motor market. You have to pay 76 USD to add your used car to the listing. There are numerous free alternatives, but people still use Finn because it is the place to go.
When free alternatives can't compete, what can?
But on the positive side, there's not a lot of spam :-)
Examples: http://www.finn.no/finn/car/used/result?CAR_MAKE=749
http://www.finn.no/finn/realestate/homes/result?areaId=20061
Frankly, I wouldn't buy a ham sandwich from Meg Whitman.
As an aside, I'm listening outside my window right now, and am overhearing a couple of busboys at the nextdoor restaurant speaking in Spanish about how to find rooms for rent on Craigslist.
-- Fred
I'd love it if my little hobby project (http://dibs.net) managed to take off, even a little bit. It'd be dead-simple to write apps against the API. I'd encourage it! IMHO, Dibs is what CL would be if it weren't built a decade ago.
Edit: A quick re-test with the google map thingy shows me that dibs.net doesn't even want to know about Lucerne, and instead is fixated on suburbs and villages around Lucerne :(
My advice: Until there's some magical geolocation service that works 100% all of the time, don't offer it. I know I can change it on your site, but many many many people won't be doing that.
As for "my issue", it's the fact that I'm in more or less dead-central Lucerne, yet I can't for the life of me get the google maps widget to interact with your geolocation script to show "Lucerne". It gives me "Within 0 miles of" and then a list of suburbs and villages just outside of Lucerne: Emmen (4km away), Horw (about the same distance), Kriens (just outside of Lucerne), and Weggis, which is about 20km further down and on the other side of the lake! :D
It also has a practically-unimpeachable reputation as a company which doesn't seem to have much interest in making as much money as it can - only as much as it needs to make.
It does have a number of weaknesses, though. Certain areas are gigantic, useless spam traps. Some territories (the UK springs to mind) are full of basically nothing. Some other territories (like Ireland) are almost entirely uncovered. And a spam-controlled free version of those parts CL is charging for would have a chance at competitiveness.
Nobody's "become a serious threat" to CL because nobody as yet is trying to hit those soft areas while also providing the other services you can get at CL.
Making "a dent in the CL market share" is probably the wrong metric to pay attention to, though - a number of CL-alikes have significant traffic outside the US where CL basically sucks at the moment and has no market share to lose. A quick comparison of Gumtree.com in London versus its CL equivalent shows that it's not Craigslist in pole position.
Again, on localisation of content: CL contains an awful lot of material of no direct relevance to the city you're supposed to be looking at, and all its discussion areas are US-only but propagated worldwide anyway.
I get the strong feeling that on top of all this, CL reinforces its innocuous-little-guy image with its almost wilfully unstyled UI. I doubt that a slick WebTwenny design would help any competitor.
By storing only very minimal posting metadata, and eschewing an API that would allow mash-ups and alternate browsing interfaces, Craigslist offers the same (often overlooked) advantage that old-school classified ads do: namely, they more or less force people to read a lot of the ads in order to have any chance of finding something.
That's better for sellers, because it increases the chances their ad will be seen, and in many cases it benefits buyers, too, since they may stumble across ads that would never have shown up in a more sophisticated search result set.
try to make anything "better" than craigslist almost requires that you force people to provide more information and make it less likely for them to use your service
In response to your question , I think it's hard because the value of craigslist is in the breadth of it's listings and readers, not in any technical feature. I think a competitor will likely have to take advantage of an already captive audience. I thought facebook marketplace had a great shot, but it didn't seem like they focused on it much.
If anyone wants to become a serious threat to craigslist, there is a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.
I don't have an answer. Until someone comes up with one...
This is the same reason why it's hard to beat google, ebay, etc.
Things change when the company which owns a market leading product makes a mistake - case in point: Microsoft Windows Vista.
And craigslist has a lot of users...
It's the same reason you find Google & Ebay continue to dominate their respective markets.
That right there is a result of branding.
It's the same reason why Coke dominates the soda market, if someone walks into a store to get a drink of some form, the chance that they will get a Coke is high - when any of the drinks will essentially do the same job.
To add some perspective I'll give a recent personal experience, which isn't conclusive by any stretch but illustrates my point easily enough.
I have an Uncle who approached me last week asking for advice about buying his first computer because he wanted to get onto the Internet so that he could search for Surfing stuff (his hobby) and also use Ebay. He's never used the net before, but already has a good idea of what Ebay is, and can name sites like Google (but not yahoo interestingly enough).