CL isnt popular here in Holland, but i was under the impression, it was ebay meets dating, using a 200 byte php forum file, that looked so old, you would just assume encodimg errors.
Why are you getting your panties in a twist? What import role does this site play in your life or that of others?
I don't think people outside the US understand how large Craigslist is. I spend 1 hour, each work day, looking at the national OMPL gig feed after its been filtered for charity/stupidity/things I don't do, to see if I can pick up supplemental clients between larger accounts.
The amount of spam and high expectations / low financial reward is high, but a lot of my small business contracts are from Craigslist.
Craigslist is nowhere near that popular. It the largest secondary market for a lot of things, but for more people trade there car back to a dealer than use Craigslist etc.
the "ebay meets dating" impression is not correct. Craigslist is closer to an "Online Classified Ads" which is popular for posting jobs, apartment rentals, cars, sporting equipment, musical instruments, and pretty much everything else you might post in a classified ad.
I'm told it is one of the 100 most popular sites on the internet (and one of the 50 most popular in the US).
One of the reasons people feel strongly about it the platform nature. If you don't like the Craigslist interface for finding apartments, you don't have much choice. That is where everyone lists their apartments. Similarly, it is the first place everyone lists apartments because it is widely known that this is where users check.
For that reason, it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.
>> it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.
This. CraigsList's search features for cars are abysmal. AutoTrader.com, on the other hand, lets you do awesome stuff like "find me a Toyota or Honda sedan costing less than $12,000 within 15 miles of me", save that search, and get email alerts when new matches come in.
But in my market, all the sellers were on Craigslist.
Alright. That sounds very anti competitive. And if they truly have a monopoly likely illegal as well.
I really wish, we had proper laws to deal with all these vendor lockin tricks. Its as if the free market, without proper regulation just ends up promoting innovation in loopholes that give an unfair advantage.
Everyone wants to be a cable company these days, and be selling access to customers. Instead of contributing something of actual value themselves, they just want to tax others when they do. Hijack the customer, and be the middle man.
They all essentially implement the same bussiness model as the mob.
It's not really anti-competitive, and it's very unlikely to be illegal. It's just a fairly classic natural monopoly.
There's only likely to be one major classified ad company, because advertisers want to use the site with the most users, and users want to use the site with the most classified ads. That's hard for a competitor to break into, not because of anticompetitive behavior by Craigslist, but because of the nature of the market.
As for the law, the general rule of thumb, in the US at least, is that it's not illegal to have a monopoly, but it is illegal to use your monopoly to dominate a second market.
I read it as this posting is exclusive. I can make a similar posting somewhere else. Sure, I can't copy-pasta, but if CraigsList thinks that because I post on their site that I can't post it on other sites as well I would LOVE to see them try to sue me.
You cant copy pasta your own content. I totally agree though: this will never hold up in court.
If they want to "own" user submitted content, they need a signature. Just putting some terms up will not suffice, unless the site "sell us your exclusive content" with big "make CL own this content" buttons.
I don't know about Holland, but CL is HUGE in the U.S, and I mean REALLY HUGE. I've sold stuff, rented apartments etc from CL, because that is where the crowd is. I know of people who use it for everything, and they are very happy. Takes a minute to post the ad, it is free, and even 70 year olds know it.
It is beyond me, why they refuse to improve the service. They could do it one small step at a time, carefully and slowly, so they don't upset their not so tech savvy audience (much of their audience falls in this category)
Things might change soon if they keep behaving this way, but at this moment, no-one comes close to CL (ebay may be, but you can't rent apartments from ebay)
CL isnt popular here in Holland, but i was under the impression, it was ebay meets dating, using a 200 byte php forum file, that looked so old, you would just assume encodimg errors.
Why are you getting your panties in a twist? What import role does this site play in your life or that of others?