Craigslist blocking Airbnb.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3897379

by foxit • 14 years ago

50 38 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

http://i.imgur.com/ILEyc.jpg

While updating our ads today, this is what appeared on the screen. We can't submit an ad that contains airbnb.com. No explanation why.

foxit10• 14 years ago

Image as link: http://i.imgur.com/ILEyc.jpg

foxit10• 14 years ago

I hope this submission gets noticed. Craigslist is the absolute best way to advertise Airbnb listings. Without it, we're kinda sunk, and it could have a big impact on Airbnb's bottom line.

SeoxyS• 14 years ago

I disagree. I've been an Airbnb host for 6 months now ($13k+ of revenue so far for our spare bedroom / couch in prime SF location, fantastic reviews). We used to use the Craigslist posting feature in the early days, but we now get so many requests that we actually have to decline most, just from organic Airbnb search and referrals. The quality of users referred through Craigslist has historically been lower than organic Airbnb users, so stopping Craigslist was a no-brainer. In fact, the only bad experience we've ever had was a Craigslist guest.

foxit10• 14 years ago

1. You have a prime SF location and your fantastic reviews will always get you a high place in Airbnb's listings. SF and NY have enormous exposure. Enough people coming to town a) need an alternative to high hotel prices and b) are aware of the existence of a site called Airbnb that you will never run short of guests.

2. We don't use the Craigslist posting feature through Airbnb's site. It would make some sense for Craigslist to limit the use of that tool, since they have limited the use of other automated tools (limiting their own utility as a service, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about). This is not being able to type "airbnb.com" into the posting form at all, something quite different. Potential guests ask for reviews, as they should, and we direct them upfront in our Craigslist ads to Airbnb, Homeaway, and other places we have excellent reviews.

eps• 14 years ago

Do you work for Airbnb?

foxit10• 14 years ago

I operate vacation rentals and my family makes part of our living through Airbnb, and thus have an interest in their continued growth and success as a company.

foxit10• 14 years ago

To whomever is downvoting everything I am posting, tell me why.

I think this is REALLY important. I didn't want it to pass without notice as when I posted the "Airbnb killer" link 10 days ago; that was worth noting too, but this is vital. Ability to link to Airbnb on Craigslist may not be important in the large markets where people will see your Airbnb ad anyway, as in SeoxyS's case, but for the just-getting-going places where Airbnb wishes to grow, it's vital.

igorsyl• 14 years ago

Try using an URL shortener such as http://bit.ly

ianferrel• 14 years ago

When I see a URL shortener in a craigslist ad, I assume it's some kind of spam.

I bet a lot of other people do, too.

poppew3• 14 years ago

I think craigslist is notorious for this. I remember they recently blocked my favorite posting app, Bazaar, and all they did was host the images you posted from your phone. This was the simplest most user friendly app to post to craigslist with. So basically craigslist blocked any ad that had an image hosted by Bazaar. Killing Bazaar was a huge disservice to me as I stopped posting as many things to CL and a huge disservice to their community.

These guys are doing a disservice to the American public. Imagine how much more used stuff could be sold on craigslist if their interface and experience was better. One statistic is smartphones, which can resell for as much as $200 after two years of use, yet most people leave them in their drawer. If a platform existed where selling and buying was easier, then people that are too busy to use craigslist would have an alternative to give new life to the stuff that is just sitting in their drawer. More people could own higher quality products instead of buying the cheaper new crap as an alternative. We consume way too much new crap. I bet there are >10 million used iphones sitting in drawers, while cost conscious consumer resort to buying the Motorola Triumph as that is all they can afford for $200. I know a lot of people love craigslist, but it is time for something better. It is time to create an efficient and "beautiful" consumer to consumer marketplace that everyone wants to use. Craigslist is huge, but it serves only a fraction of the potential customer base. I would bet more people would use it if some of its fundamental flaws were fixed.

End of rant... Let me know if you agree. I am actually doing something about this and am always open to input and help...

incongruity• 14 years ago

> These guys are doing a disservice to the American public.

This comment blows my mind. How quickly we take things for granted is astounding.

CL is a largely FREE site – I for one have sold around $1k of stuff I didn't want on there in the last decade or so – not much, but I paid exactly $0 for that. Try that with eBay or, even better, your local newspaper classifieds.

The entitlement that lurks behind comments like the one above – or at least the hyperbole within it is amusing, at best.

CL works – it's far from perfect, sure, but it's perfectly free for most users and most things – the change it has brought about and the value its given to its users makes it a textbook case for service to the American public in my book.

Now, if we want to talk about how it can be made better, sure, there's a lot there, but don't blow it up to be a crime against humanity, or God, King or Country...

poppew3• 14 years ago

Keep in mind this was a rant. Craigslist is awesome in many ways and has provided tremendous value over the years. All I am saying is their stubbornness to not improve has left a lot of value on the table. If someone else, maybe more capitalistic, was running craigslist we would probably be benefiting from it more at this point. Their monopoly of the local marketplace allows them to be complacent. The fact that they use their monopoly to not improve or let anyone else improve their platform is a crime in my mind. Just because it is free does not justify not improving it. There is huge a market inefficiency here that they are using to their advantage at the cost of the consumer...

vijayr• 14 years ago

Totally agreed, the level of entitlement among the public is really amazing, especially when it comes to online/free services. CL is not a charity, it is not a non-profit. They can do anything they want, as long as it is legal. Of course their interface is bad etc. But they've got the biggest audience, the site is fast/predictable/never down, they also do their best to keep spammers/scammers out. What else could we ask from a totally free (for the most part) service?

intended2• 14 years ago

?Beautiful.

Does that really matter? Take a bloomberg terminal - its literally arcane. If you don't know the specific commands to type, and the stock naming system they and only they use, you won't be getting anywhere.

You would never have someone make an interface like that today. At the same time - it works. Once people get learn it, it moves into muscle memory. Since it obeys internally consistent rules, its also possible to uncover more functionality once the first beach head is made.

If you want more brutal examples - think of DwarfFortress, nethack and other ascii based games. Once you know the command structure, it becomes second nature.

You may not need a beautiful interface. The interface is just a wrapper.

poppew3• 14 years ago

It works, but what I am saying is it works for a fraction of the population. Those that have time to hunt for deals and deal with flakes and last minute hagglers. There is a ton of people like this, but I argue that there are even more people that would use it if it were cleaner. Why force people to develop "muscle memory"? The rate of recycling of used goods would be much higher if craigslist was more open to either improvement of their platform or to startups building features for their community. Maybe the folks that want to develop "muscle memory" to fish out deals can do so at the cost of their time and score the best deals, but the value of time varies a lot from person to person and even from year to year. For example I sold a bunch of stuff on craigslist in college, but now that I have a job I don't bother with anything less than $200. I usually just donate it to the salvation army and write it off my taxes or let crap pile up in my garage. If I had an app that I could use to post and sell objects quickly and easily I would use it. I'd even be happy to pay someone to make this simple and easy. I am not saying to make a new service a paid service, but let free markets and innovative entrepreneurs figure out how to justify the costs of improvement. I definitely think craigslist has generated an insane amount of value, but I the bar can be set higher. They have definitely done net good, but if they continue to use their monopoly of the local online marketplace as a justification for not improving their site, I think it is bogus.

Either improve craigslist or let others build value added tools on top of craigslist. Why stop an app like Bazaar that helped people post things easily? Let people make up their own mind. Using smartphones as an example again, people will trade int their iPhone 3GS for $80, when they can get $160 for it on CL. So there is definitely demand somewhere in the massive gap of services that retailers and B2C companies offer and what exists on craigslist. Making consumer to consumer commerce smoother and easier is a huge opportunity in my mind that is not only lucrative, but fills in a big gap that exists because craigslist is still stuck in 1995.

jeremydavid• 14 years ago

Perhaps it has something to do with last year's infamous "Craigslist Airbnb scandal"?

http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603844

philipdlang• 14 years ago

Its too bad that nobody has figured out how to move onto a better version of Craigslist. Their real estate listings in particular are a major source of pain for New Yorkers, and they even charge for postings there. Craigslist's lack of any customer support opens a black hole for any account issues you may be having.

andrewfelix2• 14 years ago

Craigslist has an established audience. It's the same with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Once a service reaches a critical mass it becomes very difficult to dislodge its position in the market.

photon_off• 14 years ago

People like you contribute to the problem.

Your company, Suitey, spams the hell out of craigslist.

bizodo• 14 years ago

I think it's bc they found out about how airbnb used robots, scrapers and fake gmail accounts to scrub Craigslist and spam people listing their apt.

jurre• 14 years ago

I think you should post some proof when making accusations like that?

foxit10• 14 years ago

I think he's referring to what jeremydavid posted above: http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

It's an inaccurate representation of what happened as well as a year-old story, and I don't think it has much relevance to why they chose to block airbnb.com today.

athst• 14 years ago

I don't understand - why should they allow AirBnB postings in the first place? When someone comes to Craigslist, I think the assumption is that you'll be doing business on Craigslist and not through a third party site like AirBnB. Why should they allow another company to take advantage of their audience if they don't want to?

andrewfelix2• 14 years ago

Yeah it's funny the expectations people have of long running commercial services like Craigslist. Craigslist is not a public utility.

bahoo• 14 years ago

Agreed; but listings do often link out to other external sites. CraigsList seems to draw the line between a property management company and somebody like AirBNB.

foxit10• 14 years ago

This isn't about them allowing postings via airbnb, but rather not allowing the string "airbnb.com" to appear in the ad.

foxit10• 14 years ago

What in the world was this downvoted for. Seriously. I was explaining a misunderstanding.

For those who don't know, Airbnb has a posting-to-Craigslist option. It is not an auto-poster; rather, it formats a post into the html that'll be accepted by Craigslist, then you have to log into your Craigslist account to post to Craigslist what Airbnb's given you. We haven't used this option since we started. It does invite you to go to Airbnb's site so the transaction is not being conducted via Craigslist's email system. It chooses "no email - see below" as the default option and does not include a phone number. You can, of course, since you are the poster and it's not being auto-posted, change anything and everything about the format and the options.

Then you have our situation, the situation that has developed. We indicate our reviews on Airbnb and other services. The other services remain fine and untouched. But we can no longer show potential customers our Airbnb reviews.

ericd2• 14 years ago

I think this is likely an automatic ban for an unusual non-dictionary word/phrase, probably just another automatic tool in their arsenal against spammers. I don't think Craigslist has it in for AirBNB specifically.

foxit10• 14 years ago

I post ads every single day of the week. This is the first occurrence of the term being blocked.

ericd2• 14 years ago

Yeah, it takes a LOT of posts with that unusual word to initiate a permablock of the whole word. Before that, it just counts against your dupe score, I think.

garethsprice• 14 years ago

I'm guessing they got blocked because of the automated "Post to Craigslist" feature on AirBnb that pushes an AirBnb user through various screens on Craigslist, filling in information automatically, and all the user has to do is hit "Submit" at the end.

CL is openly against anything that isn't a human individual expressing their energy by posting ads to another human individual via manually entering text into a mid-90s HTML interface. Anything else is too much like capitalism, man.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

It's not about capitalism, it's about the tragedy of the commons. Spend some time in the Craigslist Flagging Forum and see what kind of garbage people are trying to post. Craigslist's persistent value to their users is precisely a function of its self-imposed limitations.

foxit10• 14 years ago

Ha. I see they've gotten around it temporarily by changing the link to airbedandbreakfast.com, as in this ad:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/vac/2983382098.html

rhizome4• 14 years ago

Ban evasion is never a good strategy, and it reflects poorly on AirBnB that they would start adopting spammer tactics.

Craigslist blocking Airbnb.com

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