Yeah, their lack of concern for profit made them stand out and it makes it really hard to compete. When everyone else was charging for listings, Craigslist came in and took that whole market. Now everyone else has to give it away for free as well as convince people to switch (and pay marketing money to let people know they even exist as an alternative). If you were starting a business, would you want to use up capital just to be able to give something away for free? Right now the hurdle is just to big too jump over.

"besides better search"

You say that like it's not a big deal. It's 8 am in Honolulu, one of the smaller cl cities, and there are 200 cars posted today. There's no way to search by year, blue book, mileage, etc, all of which are (generally) possible with the existing data. I think craigslist could be much more useful.

The biggest thing holding them back is their uncharacteristic resistance to mashups. I strongly believe they're working against their own aims (public service) in shutting down services that scrape their data.

I just spent a better part of an hour typing out a response only to lose it.

To summarize:

Search is key. CL are a non-player in our market, but the CL equivalent cannot compete with us in automotive.

Why? High quality reference data, the kind that means you can't add a 1999 Ford Pinto CL if no such thing exists, and if it did exist we know it came with an iPod dock, is reasonably expensive to create and maintain and generalist just don't have the focus.

High quality reference data leads to high quality search, where you search for 2007 Ford X and get only '07 Ford X' or you search for late model BMW's between $25k and $33k and get exactly those, tends to deliver high quality buyers. Search quality and lead quality are inextricably linked. Sellers tend to follow high quality buyers.

I don't know how CL fares vertical for vertical, but I'd be quite surprised if in most markets they were the #1 player in each vertical.

CL as a datasource is far less valuable as CL as a destination.

It's not an aggregator, its value lies in the fact that it has tremendous brand recognition far more than the sheer volume of data it has.

I don't think you can call craigslist anything like a non-profit until the story is over. Currently they are earning millions a year while the value of their business continues to skyrocket. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, I just wouldn't call it a non-profit because they are making hundreds of millions a year in (unrealized) capital gains. If one day they cash that in with an IPO, then all of this "non-profit" talk will just have been a clever marketing strategy. If they don't ever cash in, or give away the bulk of their fortune, then these guys are the next Mother Theresa. But only time will tell.

I've heard different answers to this question before but how exactly does CL make money and what is the source of these "unrealized capital gains" to which you refer?

> what is the source of these "unrealized capital gains" to which you refer?

The craigslist folks could sell the company in the blink of an eye. The amount for which they could sell it is continually increasing.

They make a ton of money from job postings.

Yes, but until they do this, it's very hard to compete with them, unless you have infinitely deep pockets.

One thing I would love to see craigslist do is learn what kind of things I am interested in, so that it could more readily display me ads from people who might have something I'm looking for.

It's great that its so expansive, and search is ok - but sometimes while scouring it, you come up with little gems that make you go "oh wow"...

If you could create something that would give you more "oh wow" moments, I think you'd have enough of a disruptive technology to draw away some of their users.

I would make craigslist look good. A friend that teaches told me that Kijiji is taking off amongst his coworkers because it is more visually appealing.

Craigslist search is very good, I think.

They don't like allowing different kinds of searches or mashups. Some examples are searches that show included images beside each entry & a preview of the actual text, or searches that search further than just one region, or searches like housingmaps.com, which craigslist seem pretty ambivalent about. They want to stay in their own format and not let people take that format and transform into something that's possibly better.