I Am The Anti Craig Options

[Peter Everhard]

call me arrogant, but I think I know more about New York City than a bunch of hard-up nerds holed up in some house in San Francisco. My "apartment listing service" at http://www.tempcity.com/drama/discus/messages/5/867.html makes MORE money than Craigslist's apartment listing service (since craigslist makes $0 dollars from listing aparments for rent). And I would add that my "apartment listing service" makes money without having 5 million hard-up loser fahkers camped out on my website every day "looking for companionship" and buying nothing.

I think Craigslist is a great little resource, obviously perfect for San Francisco.

But, $7 million dollars a year (craigslist's reported annual revenue) is probably what the head of the Corcoran Group in NYC (largest real estate broker in NYC) has in her office "petty cash" bowl.

It is not rocket science to give away free space and free bandwidth to people who don't want to or who can't buy stuff on your website. Plugstar.com is selling itself as "craigslist-like". Is it just coincidence that you don't see a lot of major internet companies eager to jump at a business plan that involves having 5 million free-loaders camped out on your website all day burning up bandwidth and buying nothing?

The whole central concept of local is that a guy in his city can succeed because he knows HIS market better than anyone else (because he lives there).

Craigslist http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=20040813
has nothing to do with New York City. Sure, there may be enough hard-up lonely White Females in NYC (and on Long Island and in NJ) to give craigslist some respectable traffic, but come on. There are $8 million people in NYC and only 38% of them are White. DC is 85% Black, Philiadelpia is about 60% Black. There are reportedly 20 million people in the LongIsland/NewYorkCity/NorthernNewJersey metro area. When you consider a potential 20 million customers in the the NYC metro area along, craigslist's traffic and job postings don't even rate a concern by newspapers and websites targeting New York City.

About the only city on the East Coast close to the racial mix of San Francisco is Boston. Is it then any wonder that the next market craigslist is looking to charge for job postings is Boston? Boston is probably the 2nd largest job posting market for craigslist if you consider job postings per % of population.

Maybe craigslist is aiming for the White suburbs rather than the clearly non-White urban areas. The metros on the East Coast have nothing in common with the metros on the West Coast. If in Philadelphia, DC and NYC you can be anywhere in the city in about 30 minutes without having to drive or own a car, why would a significant number of people need to turn to the internet to hook-up or buy stuff?

The idea of craigslist going into every city with the idea that it knows more about those cities than the people in them IS Corporate Arrogance; it shows that when you scrape away the top couple of layers, Craig is just like every other Corporation, they all want to rule the world.

In The End It All Comes Down To Real Estate

For reasons we point out elsewhere, craigslist has a very limited future using job postings for a fee as its sole source of revenue (the government is in the middle of building free job posting websites). All signs points to craigslist trying to morph into a for-a-fee real estate listing service.

In an interview in Wired today, Craig Newmark brags that craigslist is the "most popular" real esate listing service in NYC (is this hard to do when you don't charge a fee?) The top two real estate brokers in NYC (Corcoran Group and Prudential) both cleared $6.5 BILLION dollars in sales last year. Craiglist reported total annual sales are not even in the 100s of millions.

It seems to me that in order to clear $6.5 billion a year in sales year, real estate brokers in NYC MUST have some kind of "popular" listing system that works for them. www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/craigslist.html?tw=wn_tophead_7