via reddit,
It’s been noted when comparing the top ranked sites and their employee numbers, Craigslist presents an anomoly:
But I really like Michael Slater’s lessons to draw from this:
* Providing a valuable service for free can attract a large and loyal audience. This is one case where the first-mover advantage is tremendous. You want to post your ads where lots of people will see them, which makes it hard for a new site to gain traction.
* Design is secondary to functionality, at least for sites that are delivering a simple utility, rather than entertainment. When compared to a newspaper’s classified ad section, craigslist isn’t especially ugly.
* User-generated content can form virtually the entire content of a very large site, if you choose your domain carefully.
* With user-generated content and little effort expended on design and new features, it is possible to have a lot of traffic with a very small staff.
Actually, I don’t find craigslist’s design ugly at all - it’s the perfect answer to an over-designed web. It’s the same refreshing focus on function over form and quick load time that explains why I like reddit over digg. Also - craigslist offers some of the best rants on the Internet.
via reddit,
It’s been noted when comparing the top ranked sites and their employee numbers, Craigslist presents an anomoly:But I really like Michael Slater’s lessons to draw from this:
* Providing a valuable service for free can attract a large and loyal audience. This is one case where the first-mover advantage is tremendous. You want to [...]
Comments
@ 01:35
I think Michael Slater’s point is absolutely right - I describe it as a crowd dependent service i.e. one where the size of the customer base actually determines it’s usefulness, skype being another example. In such a service, people will herd towards the largest crowd, happily foregoing the “best” for the largest. Such services are fascinating from an investment standpoint at inception as I discussed the other day in a post (http://greatapps.blogspot.com/2007/01/ill-use-it-if-you-will.html)
@ 16:03
Haven’t you wondered what all those people do in places where they have a big staff? It’s not like “WTF? How come they are so small?” It’s more like “How can people live in unreal circumstances and not realize it?”
If you consider it, that’s one of mankind’s big questions. Don’t you wonder if people working in the White House realize that some people around them are nuts?
How can people encounter powerful systems and NOT take advantage of them. Isn’t that a premise at Smart Mobs or am I off track?