Why Craigslist's Business Model is so successful?

Craigslist is a supremely popular listings site. Craigslist was founded by Craig Newmark in March 1995 as an email list site for San Francisco and Bay Area events. In June 2000, it added its second city, Boston, and then expanded to the major metropolitan cities in August 2000. As of July 2014, Craigslist covers more than 700 local sites in 70 countries.

Social impact:

Life changing: affiliation/belonging

Emotional: reduces anxiety, provides access, badge value

Functional: saves time, simplifies, makes money, reduces effort, avoids hassles, variety

Classified advertising:

Classified advertising is most prevalent in newspapers, online publications, and other periodicals that may be sold or given for free. As a result, classified ads are much less expensive than more prominent display ads companies use, even though advertisements are more prevalent.

Advertising:

This approach generated money by sending promotional marketing messages from other businesses to customers. When you establish a for-profit company, one of the most critical aspects of your strategy is determining how to generate income. Many companies sell either products or services or a mix of the two. However, advertisers are frequently the source of the majority of all of the revenue for online businesses and media organizations. This is referred to as an ad-based income model.

Barter:

Without currency, it is a kind of trading in which products or services are traded. Typically used during periods of high inflation or scarcity of money, barter has become a popular method of negotiating agreements such as offers to purchase excess products in return for advertising space or time. With the introduction of the internet, bartering shifted from a largely person-to-person transaction to a primarily business-to-business one, where every day, commodities ranging from manufacturing capacity to steel and paper are bartered across international boundaries.

Acquiring non customers:

Acquiring non customers who traditionally did not seem to be the target of customer value proposition. Customer acquisition refers to gaining new consumers. Acquiring new customers involves persuading consumers to purchase a company’s products and/or services. Companies and organizations consider the cost of customer acquisition as an important measure in evaluating how much value customers bring to their businesses.

Digital:

A digital strategy is a strategic management and a business reaction or solution to a digital issue, which is often best handled as part of a broader company plan. A digital strategy is frequently defined by the application of new technologies to existing business activities and a focus on enabling new digital skills for their company (such as those formed by the Information Age and frequently as a result of advances in digital technologies such as computers, data, telecommunication services, and the World wide web, to name a few).

Codifying a distinctive service capability:

Since their inception, information technology systems have aided in automating corporate operations, increasing productivity, and maximizing efficiency. Now, businesses can take their perfected processes, standardize them, and sell them to other parties. In today's corporate environment, innovation is critical for survival.

Online marketplace:

An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a kind of e-commerce website in which product or service information is supplied by various third parties or, in some instances, the brand itself, while the marketplace operator handles transactions. Additionally, this pattern encompasses peer-to-peer (P2P) e-commerce between businesses or people. By and large, since marketplaces aggregate goods from a diverse range of suppliers, the variety and availability are typically greater than in vendor-specific online retail shops. Additionally, pricing might be more competitive.

Exposure:

This model collects data and connects it to others; it is suggested to investigate the impact of advertising on consumer purchase dynamics by explicitly linking the distribution of exposures from a brand's media schedule to the brand purchase incidence behavior patterns over time. The danger is that we may be unable to react productively and cost-effectively to technological and market changes.

Hidden revenue:

A hidden revenue business model is a revenue-generating strategy that excludes consumers from the equation, preventing them from paying for the service or product provided. For example, users of Google do not pay for the search engine. Rather than that, income streams are generated via advertising dollars spent by companies bidding on keywords.

Nonprofit organization:

The nonprofit world rarely engages in equally clear and succinct conversations about an organization’s long-term funding strategy. It works on funds and provides services to the user free of cost. That is because the different types of funding that fuel nonprofits have never been clearly defined. A nonprofit organization is often dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a particular point of view. In economic terms, a nonprofit organization uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's shareholders (or equivalents) as profit or dividends.

Peer to Peer (P2P):

A peer-to-peer, or P2P, service is a decentralized platform that enables two people to communicate directly, without the need for a third-party intermediary or the usage of a corporation providing a product or service. For example, the buyer and seller do business now via the P2P service. Certain peer-to-peer (P2P) services do not include economic transactions such as buying and selling but instead connect people to collaborate on projects, exchange information, and communicate without the need for an intermediary. The organizing business provides a point of contact for these people, often an online database and communication service. The renting of personal goods, the supply of particular products or services, or the exchange of knowledge and experiences are all examples of transactions.