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Maximizing Revenue for Craigslist: A Redesign Approach

This article explores the need to redesign Craigslist to maximize revenue, statistics about the website's traffic, and the goals of the redesign. It also discusses the use of open source technologies and technical challenges involved.

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Maximizing Revenue for Craigslist: A Redesign Approach

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  1. Craigslist "Maximizing revenue has never really been part of our mind-set" E-Business Technologies SS – 2009 By Sri Harsha Sanapala (Mat no. 232535)

  2. Agenda • Breif Background • Time line of Craigslist • Revenue for Craigslist • Statistics about the Traffic • Goals • Open Source • Reason to redesign

  3. Brief Background • Craigslist - Craig Newmark in early 1995 as a hobby • Local classifieds and forums - community moderated, and largely free • Jobs, housing, vehicles, general goods • Started in San Francisco in 1995 • Now over 570 cities and 50 countries • French, German, Italian, Portugese, and Spanish apart from English • Craigslist users self-publish more than 40 million new classified ads each month

  4. Page view rank Vs Number of employees (english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps

  5. Time Line

  6. All craigslist postings are free, except for: • Job posts in the San Francisco Bay Area • The fee for posting a job in the SF Bay Area is $75. This fee pays for one job in one category. (One job posted in two different categories would cost $150.) • Job posts in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, South Florida, and Washington DC • The fee for posting a job in these cities is $25. This fee pays for one job in one category.(One job posted in two different categories would cost $50.) • Brokered apartment rental listings in New York • The fee for posting a brokered apartment rental in New York City is $10. • Posts in adult services and therapeutic services on craigslist sites in the United States. • The fee for posting ads in these categories is $10. Live approved ads can be re-posted for $5

  7. Statistics about the Traffic • Overall gender neutral- VERY slightly male • Fairly wealthy and educated • Car dealers, home services and Real estate – are the main posters • Age 25-44 dominate

  8. Techinical and other challenges • Small team • Infrastructure gets creaky • Growth over years • Lack of abstractions • Too much embedded in SQL in code

  9. Goals • Use Open Souurce • Keep infrastructure small and simple • Lower power is good • Efficiency all around • Do more with less • Keep the site easy and appraochable • Don‘t overload features • People are easly confused

  10. Open Source • Craigslist has been using MySQL and the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) stack from the very start. • In less than 4 years, MySQL has enabled craigslist to grow from 250,000 page views to over 27 million page views daily - virtually all of which are generated out of MySQL!

  11. Technical Environment

  12. Reasons to redesign it… Creating a post is a long, convoluted process where the feedback is sent to you via email, not immediately on the screen No standard template for posters to enter more detailed information, like size

  13. Resources • (english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps • http://changethis.com/13.Craigslist • Madslien, J. (2005, August 4). Craigslist's silent emergence. In BBC News. Retrieved October 9, 2006, fromhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4724165.stm • Buckmaster, Jim (6 March 2007). Craig's List aims to 'stay small'. In BBC News. from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6419461.stm • http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/11/redesigning-craigslist-with-focus-on-usability/

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