How Craigslist Makes Money

Having read the Scott McCloud book that focused on micropayments almost 20 years ago, and having seen so very many people try something and have it go nowhere, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments are simply never going to be a thing.

My guess is, at the end of the day, people don't want to think about money transactions when doing ordinary things. You know that word "gamify"? Adding badges and shit to things to make tedious things "fun"? Micropayments do the opposite. Transactifying your ordinary processes makes them less fun because you're constantly thinking about spending money. It just adds friction, even just cognitive friction, when everything we do is about reducing it.

I think this is also why Patreon is taking off. People don't think about paying a penny to read a single comic, they just toss a few bucks at a comic artist each month.

You're right. Just because everyone uses it, doesn't mean it's "good". By making most ads free, Craigslist dominates the market even though they have a poor product. Take these examples:

- Buy a car. Poor make/model/year metadata requires loose searches to identify cars with keywords. So you end up sorting through irrelevant cars, or missing out on the ones you want to see.

- Find an apartment. Map search was finally introduced after Padmapper did it. Before then, you could search by the names of neighborhoods, but then you'd have the same problem: sort through tons of mis-categorized results, or miss out on the apartments you wanted to see.

- Buy used electronics. Again, poor category metadata. Want to buy a MacBook Pro, or iPhone 7? Good luck manually sorting through results that include the word "retina" or "non-retina" - or similar issues.

- Advertise your business. Great news, ads are free! Bad news: the flagging system is terribly abused, and there's no recourse because "it's free" and "the community does the flagging".

In all these cases, whether I'm the buyer or the seller, I'd much rather pay a small transaction fee or advertising fee for a better marketplace. But usually, craigslist dominates. They don't dominate because the product is good, they dominate because of network effects and an artificially low (free) price for most listing categories.

He lives in Longmount, CO, which is 15 miles northeast of Boulder, CO. He might have picked one of the best "proximity to interesting people to living expense" ratios places.

One of his ideas he highlights is to be choosy where you live and be open to moving. He is from eastern Canada originally and highly recommends the Colorado Front range cities and towns for the quality of life. The Denver area has lots of high tech and quite diverse. Oil and gas, satellites, computers, mining, scientific research, and a small VC/startup scene in Boulder. You can build a lot of housing on the nice and flat great plains and still see the mountains.

>Nonetheless, you are understanding of the sneering of the folks who are rich enough

Whoosh. Yes, but not because they are rich, but because at least it makes logical sense to look down on someone regarding his business if you actually have a bigger business.

OTOH, it doesn't make sense to sneer on someone's business if you only have the idea/dellusion/etc. that you'll make it much bigger than them.

>Sure. That's why they specified ...some startup multi-millionaire/billionaire ... Because money is not relevant to their point.

Yes, "sure".

My argument was clear enough, and as the parent wrote "it's not about money or class, it's about success in a particular field and judgement of that particular field". What part of either seems difficult to parse?

Obviously money is relevant to my point in so much as it serves as the proof of that startup/unicorn success. The idea, and it's bizarro that I have to state it again, is rather that if you're to sneer at somebody for not "making it big" with their business, it only makes sense if you do it while yourself having a bigger business.

That's why I wrote millionaire/billionaire, not because I hold millionaires/billionaires in high esteem, or find it OK for them to look down on people.

I just find it more logical for a more succesful in business person to sneer at a less succesful in business regarding the latters business success, than the opposite.