a nice article

about craigslist and how it's succeeding where former stalwarts like ebay are failing. as the article mentions, ebay owns 25% of craigslist, but this isn't why ebay is paying attention - indeed, because craigslist model is to be more of a community than a business, things like revenue and profitability are pretty low on the priority list - ebay's paying attention because it's trying to figure out how to adapt some of what has made cl successful to its own businesses, with an eye towards generating shareholder value.

implicitly, this can't be achieved, however, since it is by virtue of the fact that cl is not run like a business that makes it so successful. the allure of cl is that it's pretty much free, and that users can control their own actions on the site without being constrained by cost limitations. one might expect that cl could be brought down by an onslaught of spam, but cl has a fanatic base of users who see the cl community as their own, and police it accordingly.

the article does a pretty good job of articulating why cl is as successful as it is. i don't see cl's growth slowing any time soon and would bet that, within the next five years, traffic on cl will eclipse that of ebay. in terms of value per user, cl has most likely surpassed ebay already. the next time ebay thinks about raising rates for its services, it should think twice.