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Comment by TravisLS | Hacker News Reader

No objection to the usability assertions, but there's a huge problem with this idea that Craigslist will now always control the classifieds market no matter what they charge. This meme has caught on recently and it's time for it to die. It's not Craigslist's responsibility to provide journalism or to use their large size to extract profit and solve the world's problems.

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.

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If Craigslist charged $1, users would immediately flee to any new competing sites

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.

Yeah... the fundamental cost of classified ads isn't zero, but is so close to it that anybody who tries to charge $1 will have trouble with the ones who do it for free. That's the way to think about it, really. Running classified ads for even a medium-sized city is something that quite a lot of us could toss together in a weekend, and with the correct choice of framework, we could get it to scale fairly well in another couple of weekends. There's not much challenge.

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.)

>the fact that they cover the country, and that everyone, even very non-technical friends of mine, know what it is

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.

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