Live data from Hacker News

How Craigslist Makes Money

forbes.com

21–30 of 246 posts

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#22
post #12

Why doesn't Craigslist have mobile apps?

Craigslist is one of the best pages on the internet. It's functional, it loads fast, it doesn't have a stack built of buzzwords and bullshit. It works on every device everywhere. I mean, what business does a page have being megabytes and megabytes if it's gonna display a couple bytes of text? None. It doesn't matter if it's "technically free" these days, that's just bad design and engineering.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#23

Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years? Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

What's wrong with the UI? If I could change one thing about craiglist it would be the junk/scammers.

Competition for craigslist is hard because of network effects.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of all: Have complete control of your destiny. No investors, no bosses, etc. Here's a useful guideline to add to what you said: unless some person makes way more than the Basecamp founders (e.g. through some unicorn deal or whatever) and enjoys the same freedom to shape their product, then they have absolutely no leg to stand on to criticize their model much less to sneer. I mean, some startup multi-millionair…

Ugh, I know! I hate it when broke people have opinions.

Obviously my comment was not about not liking broke people having opinions.

It was about not liking broke "wannabe startup billionaires" sneering on people with lifestyle businesses as if they somehow "failed".

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#25
post #14

> 25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves. http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Remarkably prescient for 2008. 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels' business model. The current situation can't be the final answer. 8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants…

w.r.t bitcoin being the new payment method, so far bitcoin hasn't enabled the really game changing thing: frictionless micropayments. It's possible that lighting networks will enable this (load up your browser with 5 bucks and lock that up in a connection to the LN, pay for articles then pay 1 cent to skip ads, buy premium features one at a time etc), but we haven't seen this yet.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#26

Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years? Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

Counterpoint: their UX works perfectly well for them (see: $690m in revenue) and any proposed overhaul would carry potentially disastrous costs (see: Digg's site-killing redesign). Redesigning for the sake of change is not inherently good.

Also, on a personal level, I've come to appreciate CL's design, and I very much appreciate its consistency. I don't use CL all the time - I go to it sometimes for things like furniture I know I can't get too attached to, or rental listings. It took a little time investment maybe 15 years ago to learn how the site worked, but once you know how it works, it's fairly easy to navigate, and they have never required me to relearn the site, no matter how long I go without using it. There's serious value in that. Add in the network effect that's killing the new apps trying to challenge it and you have a behemoth.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#27

Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years? Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

What's wrong with the UI? If I could change one thing about craiglist it would be the junk/scammers. Competition for craigslist is hard because of network effects.

The comment you responded to specifically mentioned UX, not UI. Junk and scammers are definitely part of the UX.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#28

Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years? Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

When I hard reload the Craigslist home page for my state, it downloads right around 150 kb.

That is a thing of beauty.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#29

Craigslist has one of the worst UX. How come has it not been improved in years? Why doesn't Craigslist get any competition? It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better...

Because, as best I can tell, many more people actually like the ultra-simple UX than dislike it.

I wish more sites would go retro. It really is a breath of fresh air after so many sites that make me feel like I'm fighting my way through the "experience" they're trying to shove down my series of tubes.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#30
post #2

If Craigslist makes ~600M in profit , Why the hell is Forbes giving them a valuation of 3B? That's a Price to Earnings ratio of 5. That's not conservative, that's insane. Am I missing something?

Snap and Twitter both have valuation much higher than $3 billion and have zero profit. I would agree that the valuation seems high, but not compared to other tech companies.
Post reply on HN