When I mentioned CraigsList to newspaper executives on America's west coast last month the colour drained from their faces.
The list is not bad news; it's terrible news. The business model cuts at the heart of newspaper profitability and does so with such elegance, and is so intrinsically orientated to the new economy, that you can't help but shrug and say "this is the future".
Set up as a web hobby in 1995, the classified advertising network, now spawns offshoots in 175 cities across 35 countries and audience traffic that matches Amazon - a staggering 2.5bn page views per month. It has left regional newspaper executives reeling, and forced many analysts to question the future of the local press.
"We're just helping people out a bit", says founder Craig Newmark, talking about the model. "We're the guys who help a neighbour by carrying their groceries."
[from The Guardian]
The whole article is great -- go read it. It’s all about how the old-school business types cannot get their head around this new way of putting together buyers and seller, or job seekers and employers, or landlords and tenants. Could the success of Craigslist be a canary in the online coal mine, a warning to entrenched and enormous institutions that seem to dominate our lives these days that their time has finally come? You can’t steer IBM -- or The New York Times -- on a dime. Are they headed for icebergs?
(Also check out "How Craigslist Has Changed New York," at New York Metro.com. It ain’t all just about apartment hunting: one of the impacts Craigslist had, according to the piece, is that "Being a Pimpless Escort Became a Snap." Um, okay.)
