Craigslist: In Praise of Primitive

Earlier this year, Gary Wolf wrote a great article in Wired magazine about Craigslist, the world’s dominant classified ad site. Wolf cites astonishing statistics:

It’s the most popular site in the US for dating, jobs, and apartments.

It gets more traffic than the job sites Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs combined.

It also gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com despite the fact that eBay employs more than 16,000 people, Amazon.com more than 20,000, while Craigslist employs — ready? — 30.

One estimate puts Craigslist’s 2009 revenue at about $100 million, yet the site only charges a paltry $25 to $75 for help wanted posts in select cities, and $10 for apartments listed by real estate pros in New York, plus some similarly small charges for adult services.

Every month, it attracts 47 million unique visitors, or about 1/5 of the U.S.’s adult population.

Ask a B-school student how the company has achieved such astonishing scale and growth, and he’s likely to talk about network effects and winner-take-all dynamics, two phenomena that underpin the success of so many Internet companies. But cl (as many users call it) doesn’t really reflect these phenomena on any global scale. All listings and all searches are local, such that when I use the Boston section of the site it’s irrelevant to me how many users there are in San Francisco (or anywhere else). In fact, cl has actively worked to thwart programmers who have tried to build third-party services for global search.

What’s more, when the company launched the Boston site, it did so with no fanfare, publicity, or recognizable marketing. Instead, as Wolf writes, “Sometimes a new site grows very slowly for a long time. But eventually listings hit a certain volume, after which the site becomes so familiar and essential that it is more or less taken for granted by everybody except the distressed publishers of local newspapers.”

And why do users start going to each new cl city/site? It’s sure not because of the slick look, elegant user interface, or flawless user experience. Wolf writes that craigslist has “… a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, [where] miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames…Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it…it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate.”

So how on Earth does cl maintain its ridiculous popularity and growth? Very simply, because it works. It lets users initiate and advance a transaction with an absolute minimum of time, expense, hassle, rules, or oversight. And many times, this is exactly what we want.

Consider my behavior in these two scenarios. Scenario A: I’m having my motorcycle shipped a fair distance, and wanted to be sure that the carrier had a good reputation. So I used uship, and went through the hassle of setting up an account, giving myself a username, posting a description and picture of my bike, etc. I selected the winning bid after reviewing carriers’ feedback scores and comments.

Scenario B: I had a TV I wanted to get out of my house. I didn’t care at all about who came to pick it up, I just wanted it gone. So I put up a cl post, emailed the first guy that responded to it, and was TV-free after an hour. I couldn’t have cared less about whether the site I used had the latest-and-greatest design elements or social features. I didn’t want to participate in a community, give or receive feedback, or be impressed by any user interface guru. I just wanted one less piece of equipment in my house, and some guy wanted one more.

Craigslist gave us both what we wanted. Every time I use it I’m reminded of wiki inventor Ward Cunningham’s fantastic question: “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

CL CEO Jim Buckmaster understands that this is the right question to guide his company “I hear this all the time,” he says. “You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don’t you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post — we’re the leader. It could be we’re doing one or two things right.”

Hear, hear. And in addition to radically simple site design, one of the other things they’re doing right is listening to their customers. It seems they don’t really have an alternative. The company’s managers and technical staff (who are one and the same group) interact directly and continuously with the site’s end users — the people in a city who have something or want something. And as Wolf writes “craigslist’s users are not asking for such changes” as better search, a revamped design, or other snazzy features.

What generalizable insights come out of Craigslist’s example? Keep asking Cunningham’s question, and keep it simple. Listen as directly as possible to the people who use your online properties (Intranets, public web sites, eCommerce sites, etc.) and prioritize their feedback way above that of opiners and designers. Put in the minimum amount of structure — workflow, navigation aids, hurdles, safeguards, etc.– required for a positive user experience. And until there’s evidence that it’s broke, resist the temptation to fix it.

What do you think? What lessons do you take away from Craigslist’s runaway success? Leave a comment, please, and let me know.