Should craigslist ever be sold, the price likely would run into the billions. One recent report, from a consulting firm that counted the paid ads, estimates that revenue could top $100 million in 2009. Though the company is privately held and does not respond to questions about its finances, it is evident that craigslist earns stupendous amounts of cash. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and-in a special case born of recent legal trouble-advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.Ĭraigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone-nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population-it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.Įach of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Are our standards really so low?īut if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. 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. Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. * Photo: PLATON * The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.