The network effect.
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.
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.