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How Craigslist Makes Money

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181–190 of 246 posts

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#181

Forbes is unequivocally the worst website I have the displeasure of being linked to on a regular basis. Readability is quickly approaching 0. This page kept hijacking my scroll thru the article to keep an ad at the top of my window. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

I honestly don't even bother anymore: https://outline.com/xX7xe3

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/daoolpmoieinofbndd...

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#182

I remember looking up this exact question a few days ago. I really prefer to sell things like used electronics on Craigslist over eBay. I really like their business model too. They made enough to keep going, but not enough that they aspire to take over everything. It's a really simple concept, and there are very few business ideas that can pull it off.

> It's a really simple concept, and there are very few business ideas that can pull it off. The vast majority of businesses bootstrap themselves. Not on HN of course :)

I think the GP was right—there are very few business ideas that can pull off bootstrapping. The space of business ideas executable with funding is a superset of (and probably much larger than) the space of business ideas executable without funding.

Also, most of the ideas you can only execute with funding are such because they'll never make any money. ;)

The majority of all successful businesses, meanwhile, operate off a very small sub-space of the space of all business ideas. The part of the space called "workable business models."

I'd agree that if you look at the space of workable business models, probably the majority of them are either bootstrap-friendly, or common and low-risk enough that regular consumer banks are willing to finance them with debt-capital (i.e. "business loans".)

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#183
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They own their house and spend about $25,000 per year In the Bay Area, this is a multi-million-dollar ordeal in itself :-(

I get that the Bay Area is nice, but a lot of expensive housing is expensive because of its proximity to high-paying jobs. If you don't need one of those, you can live more cheaply. (Unfortunately, proximity to smart, creative people also seems to correlate with housing costs. I wonder what US cities have the best "proximity to interesting people to living expense" ratio?) I think Mr. Money Mustache lives in some Col…

> I wonder what US cities have the best "proximity to interesting people to living expense" ratio

I wonder what place, worldwide, city or not, has the best "proximity to interesting people" : cost-of-living ratio. I'm at a place in my life where I'd be willing to both immigrate and learn a language if it meant finding myself in this century's Venice.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#184
post #133

Craiglist, because of its age, is interestingly built on Perl[1] and four years ago brought on Perl's founder, Larry Wall.[2] [1] https://www.craigslist.org/about/thanks (CL tech stack) [2] http://blog.craigslist.org/2013/10/15/artist-formerly-known/

Craigslist are so quiet about their tech; I'm surprised there's even that much. I'd love to hear their opinions on operating some of those things at scale, given that their problems are likely much more like those of the average CRUD-y SaaS business (scaled up) than they are like those of e.g. Twitter or Facebook, who have to care about things like "realtime demand-based geographic read-only partial replication of ev…

Simplicity has its benefits.

And, to be clear, there is some info online about craigslist tech.

Source: I'm a 8+ year employee who's given public talks about tech at craigslist, some of which have been recorded and are online.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#185
post #163
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this based on a thing I think I read a long time ago, but isn't all of CL's tech focused solely on preventing any indexing of the site? It's no wonder they would keep it quiet.

I would like to believe this, but given the amount of spam that gets posted to CL—and given how well a sophisticated, heuristic anti-indexing WAF would block spambot request traffic as a simple side-effect—I find the idea a bit dubious.

Dubious indeed.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#186
post #163
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this based on a thing I think I read a long time ago, but isn't all of CL's tech focused solely on preventing any indexing of the site? It's no wonder they would keep it quiet.

I would like to believe this, but given the amount of spam that gets posted to CL—and given how well a sophisticated, heuristic anti-indexing WAF would block spambot request traffic as a simple side-effect—I find the idea a bit dubious.

A lot of spam on CL isn't created by bots, but by human beings.

As little as 3 years ago, I knew people who'd make job ads on elance asking someone to 'automate' their craigslist renewals and postings.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#187

just look at how successful a business that is, so simple, so little innovation and yet so much revenue. But despite all that, they have the best feature (X factor) in the wolrd: market timing. ohhh what i wouldn't do, to time travel back to 1995.

What's innovation have to do with it? Sounds like someone has convinced you that things have to work a certain way and you've found your first counter example...

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#188
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I flew first class once. It's the difference between being uncomfortable and being slightly less uncomfortable.

not on international flights from what i hear

No, I flew international first class and international economy. I stand by what I said, it's the difference between being uncomfortable and being slightly less uncomfortable. You're still stuck on a plane.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox + NoScript + Reader View seems to help tho I used uBlock to forbid 'weird' stuff ah I've set my UI to always use my colors :D white over black background

>ah I've set my UI to always use my colors :D white over black background How do you specify that? Are you using Stylish or something?

In Firefox 53:

Go to Preferences ("Options" on Windows), select the "Content" section, click the "Colors..." button, and change the "Override the colors specified by the page with your selections above" dropdown to "Always".

In current nightly:

Go to Preferences/Options, select the "General" section, scroll down to the "Colors..." button in the "Fonts & Colors" part, then as above.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better... What would you be optimizing for? What changes could you make that wouldn't increase the page size or slow the loading speed?

- Make the UI consistent - Stop using abbreviations everywhere (at least in the French version) - Add structure and semantics to content (not just some blank text fields where people type arbitrary descriptions) - Improve classification using image recognition and mechanical turks - Make an open API available - Get rid of sub-domains - Add trust/reputation mechanisms

I think you are confused as to what Craigslist is/wants to be.

Wtf is wrong with subdomains?

There's nothing inconsistent about the UI.

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