CRAIGSLIST "MAXIMIZING REVENUE HAS NEVER REALLY BEEN PART OF OUR MIND-SET"

E-Business Technologies SS – 2009

By

Sri Harsha Sanapala (Mat no. 232535)

Agenda

Breif Background Time line of Craigslist Revenue for Craigslist Statistics about the Traffic Goals Open Source Reason to redesign

Brief Background

Craigslist - Craig Newmark in early 1995 as a hobby

Local classifieds and forums - community

moderated, and largely freeo Jobs, housing, vehicles, general goods

Started in San Francisco in 1995o Now over 570 cities and 50 countrieso French, German, Italian, Portugese, and Spanish apart from

English

• Craigslist users self-publish more than 40 million new classified ads each month

Page view rank Vs Number of employees

Pages Employees Company (subsidiary sites)

1 10000 Yahoo! (Hotjobs, Flickr , etc)

2 90000 TimeWarner (AOL, CNN, Netscape, etc)

3 10000 Google (YouTube, Blogger, etc)

4 70000 Microsoft (MSN, Hotmail, etc)

5 50000 News Corp (Myspace, Fox, IGN, etc)

6 12000 eBay (Paypal, Skype, etc)

7 23 craigslist (N/A)

8 25000 BBC (N/A)

9 130000 Disney (ESPN, Go, ABC, etc)

10 12000 Amazon (IMDB, A9, etc)

(english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps

Time Line 1995

• Started with email in SA• Public & Non-Commercial

1997• Approached by Microsoft for ad

banner

1999• Moved to Commercial• Charge for Business who posts

JOB ads in SanFr, NY & LA

2004• eBay aquired 25% of equity from

a former shareholder

2008

• Local classified and forms for 570 cities in 50 countries worldwide

• More than 20 billion per month traffic • Places 7th world wide in terms of

english-language page view

All craigslist postings are free, except for:

Job posts in the San Francisco Bay Area The fee for posting a job in the SF Bay Area is $75. This fee

pays for one job in one category. (One job posted in two different categories would cost $150.)

Job posts in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, South Florida, and Washington DC

The fee for posting a job in these cities is $25. This fee pays for one job in one category.(One job posted in two different categories would cost $50.)

Brokered apartment rental listings in New York The fee for posting a brokered apartment rental in New York

City is $10. Posts in adult services and therapeutic services on

craigslist sites in the United States. The fee for posting ads in these categories is $10. Live

approved ads can be re-posted for $5

Statistics about the Traffic

Overall gender neutral- VERY slightly male

Fairly wealthy and educated

Car dealers, home services and Real estate – are the main posters

Age 25-44 dominate

Techinical and other challenges

Small team Infrastructure gets creaky

Growth over years

Lack of abstractions Too much embedded in SQL in code

Goals Use Open Souurce

Keep infrastructure small and simple Lower power is good Efficiency all around Do more with less

Keep the site easy and appraochable Don‘t overload features People are easly confused

Open Source

Craigslist has been using MySQL and the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) stack from the very start.

In less than 4 years, MySQL has enabled craigslist to grow from 250,000 page views to over 27 million page views daily - virtually all of which are generated out of MySQL!

Technical Environment

Hardware Supermicro 4U 7043-P8

CPU Dual Intel Xeon 3.2 512KB

OS Suse Linux

RAM 4GB

Hard Disk 36GB

Storage Raid 10 with 6-10 disks

Language Perl

Reasons to redesign it…

Creating a post is a long, convoluted process where the feedback is sent to you via email, not immediately on the screen

No standard template for posters to enter more detailed information, like size

Resources

(english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps

http://changethis.com/13.Craigslist Madslien, J. (2005, August 4). Craigslist's silent emergence.

In BBC News. Retrieved October 9, 2006, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4724165.stm

Buckmaster, Jim (6 March 2007). Craig's List aims to 'stay small'. In BBC News. from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6419461.stm

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/11/redesigning-craigslist-with-focus-on-usability/