Power Sellers Unite

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

Let me be clear: I don’t think Craigslist is going anywhere any time soon. Craig Newmark’s ad-listing service operates in over 700 locales and generates roughly 20 billion page views every month, according to the company fact sheet. Obviously, Craig and his list are doing alright for themselves.

But in comparison to the rest of the web’s social heavyweights, Craigslist hasn’t aged all that well, both in terms of aesthetics and usability. Wired hit on the problem in an August 2009 article that compares the site to other popular job boards: “[A]nother wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors — Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo’s HotJobs — but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?”

I wouldn’t go that far, but obviously what we think of as the “Internet” has changed a lot in the last 16 years since Craigslist was first launched. Even if a site looks straight out of 1995, it should incorporate the web values of 2011. Here are the five characteristics that the next ecommerce powerhouse should offer the modern web user.

more.. link to news article

RanWiz · Joined: 10 May 2012 Posts: 4

One troublesome angle on Craig's List - this info from my research, but may be either inaccurate or out of date - eBay owns 25% of the CL company!! So the future of CL may be more eBay like - an apparent oxymoron.
Still, the best market is the largest market, so although we are looking for alternatives to CL, we post the vast majority of ads on CL. There is no other local classified system that comes close to the page views.