Is there room for another classified ads website?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033557

by Skywing • 16 years ago

7 9 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It would appear that Craigslist has this market on lock down. Craigslist is almost the term people use when referencing online classified ads in general - like Kleenex.

With all the simplicities of Craigslist though, it seems like it could be updated and done better. I know 'better' is subjective, but a lot of newer technologies have come out since Craigslist was initially released. The concept could perhaps be modernized a bit.

Do you think there's room in the market for another Craigslist? What kind of things could make classified ads better?

p01nd3xt3r• 16 years ago

Yes. I am currently working on one just for shits and giggles. Its called spotted.at http://spotted.at

The things that I am focusing on are

a) realtime b) not having to provide phone number c) valid listings (e.g.: listing disappears once item is gone)

Skywing• 16 years ago

How do you plan on determining when an item has been sold or a listing has been "fulfilled"? The only way I could think of would be to make it as easy as possible for the ad's poster to mark the listing as expired, or something.

veb3• 16 years ago

I really love the idea with the map/location. Keep at it. :-)

vyrotek• 16 years ago

I sure hope so. I stopped using Craigslist a while ago and really only use my local news company's classifieds online now.

They might have more 'stuff' on Craigslist but I'm really turned off by the spam and the old feel of the site. Their neglect for a great UI and consumer experience lost them a user.

I am by no means a hardcore classifieds user, but I would really like a site that had a much more powerful search, better spam filtering and a way to clean out expired items more quickly.

veb3• 16 years ago

New Zealand desperately needs -something- good. For example, there's a student job search site (only for students) with around 2 pages full of awesome freelancer jobs (with good pay) yet I cannot sign up/get in contact with the submitters (because I'm not a student).

That's food for thought. I mentioned New Zealand, so perhaps you can find a locality where a Craigslist-type website would pay off well.

trouble2• 16 years ago

Could you tell me the name of the site? I've been out of New Zealand for awhile, but it would be interesting to see what's available.

veb3• 16 years ago

http://sjs.co.nz -- when I was looking about a month ago, there was 37 jobs with an average time of 10 hours a week at $25 an hour. They were all sorts: coding eCommerce, website maintenance, Wordpress development etc.

(to search, type 'home' then find 'IT/Computer' in the classification drop down)

Generally I find it has a better range of casual/part-time or even full-time than Seek/TradeMe.

ig1• 16 years ago

I think Craigslist/Gumtree/Kijiji are already done for. Their big value came from cross-selling across products and being the one place for everything. This was hugely valuable in the time of Yahoo where content discovery was difficult.

Now with the ease of content discovery the market is fragmenting into specialist sites, look at the profitable areas of Cragislist: housing, cars, dating. They all have specialist sites which are doing better than Craigslist, by taking the most profitable chunks of the market niche competitors are able to spend more per user in marketing and thus beat Craigslist.

In ten years time Craigslist is just going to be left with the least profitable classified ads. You have to ask yourself is that what you want to be competing for ?

Your best bet would probably to concentrate on a particular niche that you want to steal away from Craigslist (local sales, etc.) and figure out the problems people face in that niche and use that to break into the market, rather than trying to compete with Craigslist across the board in what is already a dying model.

Is there room for another classified ads website?

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