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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The thing is, if some app becomes the way to access a Craigslist forum, Craigslist effectively loses its network advantage. If Padmapper really takes off, do you think it will hesitate to start offering rental advertising itself? And what does Craigslist get in return for the risk of that?

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Funnily enough, the exact thing you described has already happened. PadMapper has a companion PadLister service (http://www.padlister.com/) that does just that.

This is very true. They could lose all that money* that they make off charging people to post there!

Oh wait.

*Miscellaneous fees for job listings in some regions, and brokered apartment listings in NY do not apply. Ask your doctor for details. Void where prohibited.

Craigslists supposedly generates > $100 million in revenue per year from rental listings. That's at risk if something like Padmapper replaces them.

Unless things have changed, Craigslist doesn't charge for rental listings. They charge for job listings.

Depends on the region.

Oh well nevermind, if craigslist make a lot of money from doing something than I certainly don't want anyone else innovating and taking their business away. We as consumers need to fight for businesses right to never have to compete with anyone else and freeze others out of the market via legal threats.

No that's not really what it's like. They are using information from Craiglists site, even if you don't respect Craigslists claim to IP on the user-submitted listings you have to respect the fact that it's their servers/resources that collect and then re-feed that data directly to their competitors. They are perfectly within their right to stop that, not just legally but ethically as well... at least IMO.

You seem to be implying that the forums which don't directly contribute revenue have no impact on the network effect which makes their job advertisements valuable. That doesn't really make sense to me.

Right, so they don't make any money if you ignore all the money they make.

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