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THE CRAIGSLIST REPORT: April, 2007 - Massive Growth

Craigslist is a juggernaut. I used to doubt its power, but that is no longer the case. For the last month, I’ve been been tracking listing volumes on Craigslist, city by city, so see if activity is growing, and to what degree - I can tell you now, its growing, and massively. Here’s the main Craigslist Tracker Index Page that gives you access to all of the charts and data.

Top 10 Urban Centers by Growth in Listing Volume:

1. blacksburg (Virginia: charts data) 64.37
2. boulder (Colorado: charts data) 57.01
3. elmira-corning (New York: charts data) 46.25
4. bologna (Italy: charts data) 40
5. iowa city (Iowa: charts data) 39.79
6. sheffield (United Kingdom: charts data) 38.2
7. tippecanoe (Indiana: charts data) 37.87
8. st cloud (Minnesota: charts data) 36.66
9. wenatchee (Washington: charts data) 36.25
10. fargo / moorhead (Minnesota: charts data) 36.1

Top 10 Losers in terms of Decline in Listing Volume

1. hong kong (China: charts data) -5.43
2. kolkata (calcutta) (India: charts data) -7.94
3. birmingham (United Kingdom: charts data) -8
4. christchurch (New Zealand: charts data) -8.04
5. mumbai (India: charts data) -8.85
6. glasgow (United Kingdom: charts data) -9.25
7. durban (South Africa: charts data) -11.02
8. bristol (United Kingdom: charts data) -15.06
9. cardiff / wales (United Kingdom: charts data) -16.12
10. guangzhou (China: charts data) -16.67

I’m tight on time today (this week), so I’m not doing an exhaustive analysis. I will draw a few high level conclusions though: growth seems to be concentrated in the US, in non-core markets: i.e.: CL is expanding in the US outside of its traditional holdouts (Bay Area, NYC, etc.). International growth is a little choppier. Note that the 10 Losers are all international. This pattern is consistent - international growth is slower.

Why might this be the case? I’d hazard a guess that localized, homegrown solutions dominate in places like China or India, while Craigslist utilizaion in these areas would be dominated by expats. That’s a very quick conjecture.

General implications: CL has most of the US locked down. Newspapers should continue to fear it. Classifieds startups should look hard at their prospects and sources of differentiation. Craigslist has only MySpace and Facebook classifieds to fear; As MySpace and Facebook ready to move into CL’s territory, I wonder if CL will add a social networking component to move into theirs?

Notes on Data and Analysis Methodology:

1. Percentage growth rates are not weighted by listing volume. So, going from 100 listings to 200 in a small town would be a 100% growth rate, even though its small in absolute numbers. So - read the numbers carefully and consider them in context until I have time to do a better analysis.
2. The period of data collection is April 3, 2007, to May 3rd, 2007. Measurement takes place in the wee hours of the AM, by a very respectful automated scraper.
3. The full dataset is available here. I’ll make it downloadable someday when I have time.
4. Some cities are duplicated if they are listed in more than one state. The numbers should match for each instance.
5. All of the charts are created with PHP/SWF Charts - which is awesome. I’m using the free version.
6. If you see a chart with “Region A / Region B” - that’s the chart tool’s default state when it encountered an error in data. I need to do some cleanup and these should go away.
7. The odd city dropped off: Denver, for instance, I only have a week or two of data for. I haven’t had a chance to see what’s happened.
8. The growth rates are a lousy metric: its the listing count on April 3rd, divided into the listing count on May 2nd. That gives you a monthly growth rate, with n=1 (i.e.: april) for each city). It doesn’t do any smoothing or anything within the month’s data, so the numbers are pretty grain-of-salt and intended to give a rough impression of what’s going on in each city, supported by the applicable chart.
9. This analysis in no way takes into account listing quality - only volume. All of the gains could be spam for all I know.

That’s it for the moment - enjoy. Comments on analysis, methodology, etc. are welcome.

classifieds, craigslist, craigslistreport, ebay, growth web

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