Nothing prevents another company from doing that, but all of the hosts & guests are already on Airbnb. Two-sided marketplaces are very difficult to start, but once they have some momentum, it's even more difficult to unseat them.

Look at Craigslist - terrible UI, hundreds of startups have tried to challenge it in the past 15+ years, and yet it's still my go-to when I need to sell some old furniture.

Craigslist has a fantastic moat: they are insanely operationally efficient. To make more money than craigslist at a lower cost is virtually impossible.

The real entrance cost to becoming a host in airbnb is not airbnb, its having a house. And a host will use airbnb or whatever to keep the appartment occupied. It can absolutely be commoditized, much like Lyft and Uber have. A service that posts your apt in multiple websites would make that permanent.

Today they must own the demand side: i have never seen something become so popular with no little ads (particularly in argentina, it was incredible to see it going from 0 to ubiquitous in 2 years). But demand on apartment rentals is incredibly price sensitive, demonstrated by the competition airlines have.

I have friends who worked at Craigslist, and was astonished to hear them describe a team of IIRC 35-40 employees. They have somewhere around 50 now? Makes you wonder what those 3k+ employees at Twitter all do.

A lot of companies have an affinity towards jobs numbers, and derive benefits from the local municpality by being able to print job numbers

It simultaneously helps the organization’s tax efficiency and MAYBE something interesting gets developed

While this doesn't explain all of the difference, Twitter tries, and largely succeeds, to distribute both Tweets and likes in mere seconds, all around the world, while maintaining a search that can find any string in relatively recent messages.

That this is a substantially harder mandate than that of Craigslist I take as a given.

Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, Content Moderation/Censorship.

It's irrelevant how many sites you can use to list your apartment. What matters is which site guests use.

Sure. Unless, let's say, a company that's already used by travelers to book travel options enters the space and/or syndicates the data to hotel search engines in addition to their own website. If I can find both hotels and apartments in hotels.com, why do you think I'd use airbnb? (Assuming apartment owners don't mind listing their space in multiple sites - which is a hard problem to solve but not an impossible one. It has less churn on the supply side compared to, let's say, Uber)

I'd argue that CL actually has a fantastic UI, it presents all the information you need, and nothing you don't, in a format that is quick to read. The only feature it's missing (or was missing the last time I needed it) is a map based list of housing for rent so you can simply filter out 90% of the listings that you'd never consider based on location anyways. That and a "prevent all Craigslist stereotypes from responding to my listing" button.

But it's not about presenting information. It's a completely different experience.

AirBnB handholds the traveller from the moment they start looking to when they're going on the trip. CL just presents an ad, and lets the parties email/text on their own. AirBnB handles the financial transactions, with all that that entails, and CL does not. AirBnB facilitates the communication between the landlord and the customer. They also let you add on "experiences" as part of your trip. They also include an identity verification system for both landlords and consumers, and there's a review/rating system for both. It might not be perfect, but Craigslist has nothing like it. For example, I generally avoid renting places that don't have reviews, and landlords can choose to ignore/reject renters who have built up a bad reputation.

CL, on the other hand, has a reputation for being full of scammers and other shady people.

CL UX is great, as both a buyer and seller.

It _could_ introduce more barriers to reduce scammers, but that would come at a cost to both buyer and seller UX.

There is value in simplicity, and the market thus far agrees.

Craigslist is the anti-thesis to the hubris-fueled notion that technology can and should solve every problem, including dishonesty. I've not yet been scammed on Craigslist because I've built up a valuable skill in identifying scammers in general rather than relying on an imperfect system implemented differently on all marketplaces. In return, I do not get scammed as a _seller_, which is something most marketplaces seem to neglect.

More broadly, we often blame human nature on software implementations, as if there was a software solution to (all of) such without trade-offs.

Thank you for putting my thoughts into words. Couldn’t agree more. Think of the comfort CL users have after 10-15 years of the same workflows, the same UI, the same expectations. The skill of vetting scammers shouldn’t be understated and transcends CL.

When I log into a “modern” app today there’s almost always a new feature in my face or an old feature moved to a new location (or simply deprecated)

Exactly. The kinds of transactions that take place by the thousands (just guessing, might be off by an order of magnitude or two?) on a daily basis on AirBnB, i.e. guests giving complete strangers money over the internet in advance to stay in their homes, and hosts inviting complete strangers over the internet into their homes in the first place, simply has no chance of ever becoming mainstream on a platform like Craigslist.

This is precisely because they're the kinds of transactions that most people would never even consider to take part in without first being able to establish a certain level of trust in the other party.

I think this is probably the biggest competitive advantage for AirBnB against challengers in the space. Bootstrapping a 2-sided marketplace is hard enough to begin with, but doing so while building up a network of trust among users so they can comfortably partake in transactions with a high trust-barrier is even harder.

Is it impossible to generate fake reviews, fake rental transactions, multiple accounts, etc. on air bnb?

The perception of safety could be more dangerous for some using air bnb as opposed to those on CL who are fully aware that there is no safety net nor hand-holding.

>Look at Craigslist - terrible UI,

I love their UI. It's fast and does exactly what it needs to do, with the bonus that I don't have to download 12 js frameworks to look at a damn listing.

Here in Utah, Ksl.com does the majority of classified transactions. Craigslist was late to market and never caught on. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-c...

I'm not arguing your point, but I think Craigslist's UI is very focused in scope and meets the expectations of its audience.

Moreover, booking.com existed long before Airbnb and is still going strong!

Does it actually have a terrible UI though? The UI is certainly basic and dated, but its so usable and distinctive.

You could argue that Craiglist's brutalist aesthetic is its genius.

Big hotel booking sites like booking.com/agoda already have the customers and the world wide logistics for handling this stuff, I can see them becoming direct competitors to airbnb in this space.

Airbnb actually disrupted them https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb

Many of the exact same properties are on VRBO.com already, so Airbnb doesn't even have a lock on their own properties.

Curious.. why not facebook marketplace?

Because it's Facebook. I know they are heavily spamming that feature but I have literally never seen anything on there of any value. It's a crappy feature that should go away.

It works in my town. In fact it’s preffered.

Their social network and brand recognition is their moat for now. Hosts and guests trust Airbnb. An upstart will have overcome a lot of momentum to take on Airbnb in the broad market.

The reviews are worth the price of admission

They are valuable for sure, but are they 1/7 appts rented out?

Traditional vacation rentals charge 15~20%, but they truly handle the key hand offs and such.

I suppose the landlords could port their reviews to a new platform by linking to the Airbnb listing similarly to how people used to post their eBay reviews when selling on forums. But yeah having all those reviews viewable natively for comparison is nice for renters.

Marketplace network effects – Hosts are more likely to use Airbnb because they have the most guests. Guests are more likely to use Airbnb because they have the most hosts.

Instant book – A host can only have "instant book" on for one platform at a time, otherwise their listing could get overbooked. They'll likely leave this on for Airbnb because they have more guests than any other platform, which adds friction to booking for other platforms.

Same as booking.com: users won't spend a second on looking at the second largest directory and directory customers cannot afford to not be present the one end users are looking at, they will grudgingly pay. The only question is which of booking and airbnb will survive, as their market overlap keeps getting bigger. In any case, those providing the actual hospitality service seem to be getting the short and of the stick.

Yeah I was thinking exactly that a couple days ago while I was booking a beach condo on a different site. Airbnb has a fair amount of competition in the vacation rentals market, and there doesn't seem to be a good defense against that. When I'm looking for a place to rent for vacation, I start with Google and end up visiting several sites. Airbnb is frequently one of them, but never the only one.

I'm not sure about the moat either. While planning a trip recently, I checked out Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO and Homeaway.com for the same area. I found that Booking.com and Homeaway.com both had some of the same listings. So landlords are certainly trying to bypass the moat. (Homeaway.com is in fact co-hosting Airbnb listings through a partnership, but they're also apparently transitioning away from that to become a full-blown Airbnb competitor.)

I suspect the moat won't matter that much, since a consumer ultimately doesn't care about which service they end up booking with, as long as it seems trustworthy, and landlords have little reason to be loyal to one service when there's no downside to being non-exclusive.

15% is a small cut. Ever sold inventory on Booking.com or Expedia? It’s a lot more than 15%. Plus AirBnB actually collects the money for you and you are paid on the day of check in. I own a small hotel in France and AirBnB is far more profitable and easy to use than Booking or Expedia. The marketing value alone is worth far more than 15% — but that 15 also includes credit card fees as well. It’s a great deal.

The standard commission rates for booking.com are 15% in fact. There are ways to push that up due additional marketing (preferred status takes it to to 18% and had requirements on average review scores last I checked).

So I don't know where you're getting your impression from that booking charges more than those 15 percent, but you may wish to recheck your numbers.

Can't comment on ease of use on the supplier side.

Source: I know that because I used to work there, ran the infrastructure eng and prod teams.

Interesting, are there also hotels in AirBnb now? In Europe I most of the time end up with Booking.com even though I regularly check AirBnb too -- if the prices are close to each other (as they surprisingly often are), I'll always go with a hotel.

I have a vacation house, which I rent out. Normal booking fees for these houses are 30%. I have a different arrangement, but thats the default.

network effects. Buyers want to be where the most sellers are and sellers want to be where the most buyers are.

to win over an existing market you need to offer something dramatically better somehow or angle it dramatically differently, not just a 3% cost difference. Remember craigslist was basically free.