If Craigslist cost $1
sethgodin.typepad.com
sethgodin.typepad.com
Only slightly more difficult. The reality is that stolen credit card numbers are easily available to anyone who really wants to find and buy them (in bulk) and so using "ability to pay money" as a criteria for detecting non-scammers is weak. That's precisely because what scammers are good at is illegal acts, like getting stolen credit card numbers.
From their Wikipedia article, "Other factors he [Craig Newmark] cites are consistency of down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity."
To me, those go away if they start charging for posts.
I'd like you to explain that one. Lots of companies charge money and have exactly those qualities.
The number of people that are willing to tell you how to run your business that do not run a comparable business always amazes me (and then there are the ones that don't run businesses at all...).
This is unbelievably weak. Godin's not exactly on a hot streak right now, is he?
On a side note, Joel Spolsky was arguing the same point a couple of weeks back on one of the SO podcasts. He obviously said a lot more, being Joel. I'm paraphrasing poorly but one of his better points was that there's a certain amount of potential money in CL that at the moment is being spent on the very small social good of totally free listings. But he lamented the fact that it used to be spent on the much greater social good of journalism, which is a waste as people don't really need free listings, but they need good journalism for a healthy democracy:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/09/podcast-67/
They went on to conclude charging on all categories in CL was inevitable to stop the spammers and perhaps they could use the extra revenue to start funding digital journalism.
Revenue for the job board was found here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...
I think there's a notable difference to Craig's list being free vs Joel's job board costing hundreds of dollars to post. ($400 iirc) With Joel's board he's inviting competitors to under cut him, and there's still a thriving job market outside of his control. Craig's list on the other hand could be argued that by keeping the cost to zero he's making it difficult for anyone to make money off of classified ads because there's always a place to go for free ads. And if nobody else can make money at it then they can't have the option to fund Investigative Journalism and democracy and all that.
I do fail to see why any other industry couldn't fund reporting, but classified ads were a good fit.
Now I really enjoyed the argument he made, but I think Joel should put his money where his mouth is. Joel never argued that Craig should fund reporting as a good business decision, he argued that if Craig wants to serve the greater good (which Craig argues he does) funding reporting is a better way to do it. I'd like to see Joel take a % of his job board and fund the greater good. Part of the problem is how does one help fund investigative reporting? I'd say invest in a newspaper but they might not be the best source. He should run some experiments, hire an investigative blogger, start a grant program for reporter interns, stuff like that. It's his money, but this is obviously a topic he feels strongly about.
In general, the free things that are good still require some sort of commitment. Money is just one of the most fungible sorts of commitment.
The fact that CL is already doing the thing that Godin just descended from the sky to tell us CL should do is, to you, evidence that this isn't 'unbelievably weak'? Will you start reading my blog if I promise to fill it with gems like "What if Google started matching ads with searches?" or "What if Amazon started up an affiliate program?"
For the record, I think Spolsky can be pretty unbelievably lame, as well. People have been talking about how CL should monetize for years.
It's well understood that the psychological difference between free and $1 is much larger than the difference between $1 and $2.
You go from a company with a dozen programmers enjoying what you do to a company of 1000s of employees making sure you have met the requirements for an out of state advertiser in Nowheresville Ak
Advertisers: Please contact us to be put in touch with our userbase of people who take the castaway things of people who are such tightwads they wouldn't pay $1 to list. They combined the technical savvy of eBay users, the purchasing power of MySpace users, and the commercial tolerance of Slashdot users! Your CPM campaigns have never seen anything like it!
Craigslistrefugees.com: Because you don't have to give a buck!
The reputation system and the monetary charges do help to curb problem users. The problems are still there, but not as bad as they would be. Or as bad as they are on Craigslist.
On the other hand, the Craigslist approach to fighting this sort of thing is "keep it local." But they've gone as far as they can with that.
When ebay started charging, the howls and cries for boycott were loud and numerous, but fact is, the quality of the listings soared, and ebay's competitors did not profit; instead, they disappeared one by one.
Love it or hate it, it's working for them.
Why not examine why it is working so well and take some lessons, and build better products?
If Craigslist charged $1, users would immediately flee to any new competing sites that only charged for job and real estate listings, just like Craigslist does now. Then Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky could complain about those sites' margins instead, and those sites could take those complaints all the way to the bank.
And per some conversations from a few months ago about how hard it is to replicate a full site like Stack Overflow, replicating Craigslist from a features point of view really does seem to be pretty easy. What you can't replicate overnight is the ubiquity of Craigslist; the fact that they cover the country, and that everyone, even very non-technical friends of mine, know what it is. Both of these could be overcome if Craigslist started charging too much. (Though if they stay the course I'm not sure how they could be defeated in any reasonable period of time.)
That's why after you build the free version, you name it something similar, eg: freelist or joeslist. Now people get the gist of what it is just from the name, you can't be sued for copyright and you're a valid competitor.
Craigslist is undoubtedly a useful service but it's trivial to implement and the only reason to use craigslist over some competitor is because everyone else uses craigslist. If you place a barrier to entry, you lose customers unwilling to pay. If you lose customers, you lose other customers.
People who post ads would, many of them. The question is whether people who read and answer ads also would, or whether the improved quality of ads would cause them to stay, making the competing sites unattractive due to the lack of an audience and finally forcing the posters to return to craigslist. This is what happened with ebay.
The question is not whether posting an ad is worth $1 to you, the question is whether having your ad read by enough people is - and for that to be true, enough people must find looking the ads on the site worth their time.
OP is saying that may not happen. People might move to another classifieds website in mass. CL might end up making a lot less money because less traffic = less price for paid sections of their site(ie. job sections in certain cities).
Combine that added usability with the critical mass it already has and CL stay dominant and will make more money than it does currently.
The premise of it is based on making money. While that is usually the end pursued by most commercial ventures, Craig Newmark has made it abundantly clear that optimizing money is never the goal at Craigslist.
That's not what I read it as. I think the key paragraph is:
Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.
Especially the last line. By charging a small amount, you remove the ability to scale to infinity. I would charge far less than a dollar per ad, though.
Not the way CL is organized.
I find that whenever I say things like this, people either look at me funny or laugh. I wish more people shared this kind of naive optimism.
A free email provider would still let you send and receive messages from anyone. A free classified listings site doesn't give you access to traffic on the paid classified listings site.
I guess the reality is, you can only have a spamerless site when all your users are more lucrative than spammers.
Anyway, even if it would result in higher profits, CL would not be interested. Because they're not interested in driving up their profits.
As a classified ad owner (2nd largest in my country), doing so would only give a chance to a newcomer.
The problem is to charge for the first penny... http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
I'm implementing a similar idea. But the adv will cost $5,00.