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
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Breif Background
Time line of Craigslist
Revenue for Craigslist
Statistics about the Traffic
Goals
Open Source
Reason to redesign
Brief Background
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Craigslist - Craig Newmark in early 1995 as a hobby
Local classifieds and forums - community moderated, and
largely free
o
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Started in San Francisco in 1995
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Jobs, housing, vehicles, general goods
Now over 570 cities and 50 countries
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
1997
1999
2004
2008
• Started with email in SA
• Public & Non-Commercial
• Approached by Microsoft for ad banner
• Moved to Commercial
• Charge for Business who posts JOB ads in SanFr, NY & LA
• eBay aquired 25% of equity from a former shareholder
• 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:
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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.)
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Brokered apartment rental listings in New York
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The fee for posting a brokered apartment rental in New York City is $10.
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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
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Overall gender neutral- VERY slightly male
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Fairly wealthy and educated
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Car dealers, home services and Real estate – are
the main posters
Age 25-44 dominate
Techinical and other challenges
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Small team
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Infrastructure gets creaky
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Growth over years
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Lack of abstractions
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Too much embedded in SQL in code
Goals
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Use Open Souurce
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Keep infrastructure small and simple
Lower power is good
 Efficiency all around
 Do more with less
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Keep the site easy and appraochable
Don‘t overload features
 People are easly confused
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Open Source
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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…
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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
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(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-craigslistwith-focus-on-usability/