Craigslist vs. Edgeio - Why does edgeio need to exis?
I received a great comment and just had to reply to it in a post. Here’s the comment in question, quoted below in full.
I understand that Edgeio has a cool solution with this Marketplaces application, but what problem are they solving? I’ve never heard anyone complain that Craigslist doesn’t do X very well, or it does too much of Y which nobody likes, Craigslist is an elegant, free solution to many of the things that it seems Edgeio is out to solve. Maybe since I haven’t used it yet I’m not able to see the big picture, but I’d like to hear about the specific problems with Craigslist that Edgeio now feels they need to address and “fix”.
Mike, that’s a great point, but I don’t agree with what you’re saying. First and foremost, let’s look at search engines - Yahoo! launched in March, 1998 while Google came out in September 1998. I suppose when Yahoo! was first unleashed, people may have been more than satisfied with this site that offers them the ability to find what they want, but something happened: competition. Let’s get to the bottom line, just because something is out first doesn’t make it the best. Yes, it functions, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon. Just as you’ve stated, you haven’t used the marketplace tool, therefore you can’t see the need for such a product. There are quite a few reasons for edgeio to exist. Here’s my reasoning at least.
First Impression
It may seem superficial, but looks are everything when it comes to the Internet. This wasn’t always the case. Before you could have an ugly site that functioned and it was okay. It wouldn’t matter what your site looked like, but if it did what we needed it would be successful. Things are different now because there are a many sites that do the same thing - what is going to make your site stand out? Aesthetics. Today’s web users are fickle and decide if they’re staying with a site in no time at all. Obviously there are other factors such as brand loyalty to look at - if you’ve been used to craigslist all the time you may not want to deviate what you’re accustomed to. What needs to be taken into consideration is the new breed, the users with no loyalty yet, who now have to decide. So you, the reader, decide, as a new Internet user, what seems more appealing?
Features and Reach
Just as you’re notbig on edgeio, i’m not that big of a user of craigslist, meaning I don’t use it at all. Why I think edgeio has the edge here so to speak, is because of features such as tagging, the geographical refining “slide” tool on the site and RSS feeds. The main reason that edgeio can more than make it in this market is that it is not only a place to put your listings, but an aggregator as well. Search results bring up ebay and amazon listings in addition to the ability to add a listing directly into the site. Another innovative feature is making a post on your own blog and tagging it accordingly so it will end up on the site. All of this is part of the reach, which goes into what we’re really focusing on...
Marketplaces
What is the big draw of marketplaces? From what I’ve gathered, marketplaces will be more than one tool, this listing feature is simply one of these tools. Recently there’s been an upsurge in the “board” and “listing” markets. It’s safe to say that this may have started with the 37 signals job board, but the real rabid popularity started with the advent of Michael Arrington’s crunchboard. The success of this made people realize how easy it could be to make revenue or offer a service with this formula. Fast forward today and you have various job board services, such as Krop, Job Thread and Job-a-matic. This just shows that there is a want and need for boards to look for jobs. With these tools, people generate revenue through job search in the same way they would with Google’s Adsense.
Now with edgeio, you can do this and a whole lot more. Create your own listing service for your demographic. You run a blog about the housing market? Create a board for people to post houses for sale or rent. You do reviews of electronics? Make a board for people to post any electronics they have for sale or want to buy. Run a site all about prestigious blogs? Then why not make a board for people to post jobs for bloggers? It’s all about the niche right now. People may still be intimidated by these large sites, be it craigslist or edgeio or anything in between. But with people able to make these micro sites, we have the ability for people to get more users of these services without them knowing since everything posted on a marketplace powered board will be listed by edgeio.com
I personally could care less about using a large site, I like the idea of doing my own site. I also like the idea that anything posted on my site will also be listed on edgio.com and those that will use the larger site can also find my stuff. It’s all about reach. If there’s anything else, I’d like to invite anyone else to give their thoughts on this.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my comment so thoroughly, here are some more of my thoughts:
“It may seem superficial, but looks are everything when it comes to the Internet.”
Maybe in our echo chamber Web 2.0 world looks and design matter more than other things, but in the real world, sites like Craigslist, eBay, Google, and MySpace are the giants and they don’t have slick user interfaces that many other sites have. I’m a designer so I want design to be important, however it’s not the most important thing for a company to be successful — identifying a specific problem set and then improving upon that is. Google search dominated Yahoo because it indexed more documents, had a better relevance sorting algorithm, and was faster (because Google’s servers hold a cached copy of the full Internet in RAM at all times), so those were the problem scenarios Google saw.
After reading this rebuttal, I see that Edgeio is *adding* many new features that Craigslist doesn’t have, but I still haven’t read anywhere about the specific problems that Craigslist currently has that their users are noticing and upset about, two things that need to happen in order for Edgeio to grab some of Craigslist’s marketshare. I guess the old saying is “don’t fix what ain’t broke” so in marketing-speak, what is the unique business proposition that Edgeio is bringing to the table that Craigslist currently addresses but does so poorly?
“The success of this made people realize how easy it could be to make revenue or offer a service with this formula. Fast forward today and you have various job board services, such as Krop, Job Thread and Job-a-matic. This just shows that there is a want and need for boards to look for jobs. “
I guess we have different ideas for the definition of success then. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry blogger put up a job board on their site and charge $50/mo for a listing which nets them a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars a month, that’s not my definition for success, that’s just some small-time supplemental income. 37signals makes tens of thousands of dollars per month from their job board because they are a huge site and are a large resource for their niche, just like TechCrunch, so they will continue to be the largest “boutique” job boards out there, and everyone else will probably net only a small percentage of the money they pull down. Of course if someone who owns a site is only looking for some small-time additional income, then maybe a job board or a classified listing that brings in a few hundred dollars per month is perfect, so if that’s the niche Edgeio is gunning for then it sounds perfect.
“Why I think edgeio has the edge here so to speak, is because of features such as tagging, the geographical refining “slide” tool on the site and RSS feeds.”
Craigslist is popular because it can be used by anyone, almost regardless of tech ability, anywhere. Features like tagging, Ajax-based sliding, and RSS only matter to the 0.001% of the population who are tech geeks and read the blogs that you and I read, aka, the tiny minority. Adding new features to a site that’s already perfect for how people want to use it just isn’t compelling enough to force people to switch in my opinion. It’s like if my favorite slice of cheesecake on the entire planet is made by Restaurant X, but a new place called Restaurant Y just opened up and is now selling cheesecake with whipped cream on top, is that enough for me to change where I get my cheesecake? Is that addition significant enough for me to ditch my current favorite place and give the new one a chance?
I have nothing against Edgeio or any company trying to do a better version of X, but I just like to know more about the specifics of what problem set they are solving, how they’re going to solve it, and the direct benefit to me (end user) to using the new vs. the old. After reading this description of Edgeio Marketplaces more, it seems like they’re competing more with eBay than with Craigslist. The vast majority of people who use Craigslist probably aren’t listing anything on the site, wheras at eBay, the vast majority of people who use eBay have probably put something up for sale at one time or another, so I think Edgeio is hitting a different audience.
(FYI: I don’t even use Craigslist, maybe once in the past year, so I’m not some type of crazy evangelist lol.)
Mike,
Thanks for taking the time to write this. You make some good points. There are a few things I think you might consider.
1. edgeio is trying to build a global, self service, classifieds ecosystem. Take each in turn.
“global” - craigslist is only in a few hundred cities, and even then it has a very long tail. Only in 5-10 does it have substantial takeup. edgeio is equally long tailish (is that a word) but we do have some listings from more than 16000 cities. The problem we solve here is the absense of any online classifieds in many cities. Our search provides results to people who couldn’t get them from craig.
“self service” - edgeio allows any site to notify us of its listings and we index them via RSS upload or other methods. This means that there can be millions of listings sites, but their content can be discovered. Our primary benefit to a lister is that we send additional traffic to them. The problem we solve here is that we remove the need to re-post a listing many times. Post once and we will aggregate and distribute your listing. this is especially useful for big listing sites like Z57 for example (a real estate site) or Dealix (an autos site).
“classifieds ecosystem” - Craig doesn’t claim to be trying to do this. We enable content owners to create listings boards that are specific to their environment and make revenue from them. Just like the newspapers, web sites can enable revenue from listings. Those who buy listings can target their lisiting to highly specific groups of readers. We provide search for those listings at edgeio.com. This is an ecosystem in the same way Google Adsense is an ecosystem for advertising. It isn’t all about edgeio. it is about the entire Internet benefiting from listings based revenue.
Final point. we are not trying to compete with Craig (as the above shoes). Indeed I think it woul help Craigs listers if Craigslist used edgeio to distribute their content, just as eBay and Amazon are. I do believe that the existence of edgeio and Craigslist are more complementary than competitive. We have three products that form our offering. Listers are our target market for edgedirect (listings upload); consumers for edgeio.com (listings search) and web site owners for edgeio marketplaces (listings as a revenue stream). Craig addresses one of those groups but in a very different way to edgeio.
Best
Keith Teare
ceo/founder/edgeio
Mike.. oh Mike … looks like you won, hands down.
They closing down
up for grabs edgeio is.. starting bid at 250,000
http://wiki.edgeio.com/display/ExternalWiki/Home
cheers
We’ve been running a bit quieter (and less costly) than edgeio these past 4 years. I will miss them, they were a great source for our marketplace listings. I think Keith will go on to do great things…seems the magic carpet got pulled out from under him.