Gosh, all that sounds amazing. Let me blow your minds, though: what if CL cost two dollars?
This is unbelievably weak. Godin's not exactly on a hot streak right now, is he?
This is unbelievably weak. Godin's not exactly on a hot streak right now, is he?
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
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.