A Better Craigslist

[vangogh]

Getting rid of the spam would certainly be nice, though I know it's not as easy as it seems on the surface. It is something we'd all like to see them do. But like you said there are other classified sites and they aren't pulling people away from Craig's List in significant numbers. There are reasons why. The value of a classified grows with the quantity of people using it as long as the content remains above a certain quality. CL has that. The site isn't pretty and there are things about it that can be improved, but it works and works well for the people who use the site.

I agree that going niche is the way to build your own classified site. Going niche provides more opportunities to tailor the site to a core audience and won't require as large a user base to get going.

[Russ in Vancouver]

CL has served me well over the years, I use it for renting out rooms to students. Not many complaints come to my mind. It's free, simple, straighforward and it protects my identity. After a while it's fairly easy to see who is real and who is a scammer.

They did implement a phone verification system in order to prevent one user from having hundreds of accounts to spam to the services categories. I would speculate that this effort did reduce the spam, lol, but it is still hardly made the surfing through garbage experience any better.

Trying to compete with CL would be more futile than resisting assimilation from the borg. However it is evident that there is room to survive in this market, as others have mentioned, niche markets. Then the marketing would be more targetted.

Best of luck James

[thegoodsoldiers]

I agree! I am not a huge fan of Craigslist set up and I do think they need some revamping but I guess they may have that mentality, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol. Tons of people use it so maybe to them simple is good enough for now.