Interesting stats from a blog posting titled The craigslist Anomaly that compares page view rank and the number of employees for the companies with the busiest properties on the Web.
| Rank (page views) | Employees | Company |
| 1 | 10,000 | Yahoo! |
| 2 | 90,000 | TimeWarner |
| 3 | 10,000 | |
| 4 | 70,000 | Microsoft |
| 5 | 50,000 | News Corp |
| 6 | 12,000 | eBay |
| 7 | 23 | craigslist |
| 8 | 25,000 | BBC |
| 9 | 130,000 | Disney |
| 10 | 12,000 | Amazon |
Another thing that makes craigslist such an anomaly is its design, which can politely be called austere or minimalist—or more directly, just plain ugly. Google is perhaps the closest, but even it is relatively beautiful, and all the others on the list seem to be operating in a different design universe.
It would not be hard to create a much more attractive version of craigslist, and there’s plenty of features that could be added. But why would craigslist do so? They have a very successful product, and it is not very vulnerable to attack. If a startup built a “better craigslist,” could they get traction? It would be tough, since the size of the user base is much more important than features an aesthetics.
What lessons can we draw from this anomaly? I’d propose the following:
Replicating this success is not, of course, something that any new site could rationally aspire to do. Perhaps the central reason for craigslist’s great success is that they took a function that was being done offline (classified ads) but could be better done online, and translated it quite simply to to online world. Their goals were modest, and they weren’t trying to build a huge franchise—they were simply trying to solve a problem. Ironically, this led to a huge and powerful franchise.
Today, alas, there’s not many widely performed offline tasks for which there aren’t already half a dozen online alternatives.
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current date: 20-Nov-2008 12:48 P.M.