1. CRAIGSLIST "MAXIMIZING REVENUE HAS NEVER REALLY BEEN PART OF OUR MIND-SET" E-Business Technologies SS – 2009 By Sri Harsha Sanapala (Mat no. 232535)

2. Agenda  Breif Background  Time line of Craigslist  Revenue for Craigslist  Statistics about the Traffic  Goals  Open Source  Reason to redesign

3. Brief Background  Craigslist - Craig Newmark in early 1995 as a hobby Craig Newmark  Local classifieds and forums - community moderated, and largely free o Jobs, housing, vehicles, general goods  Started in San Francisco in 1995 o Now over 570 cities and 50 countries o French, German, Italian, Portugese, and Spanish apart from English Craigslist users self-publish more than 40 million new classified ads each month

6. Page view rank Vs Number of employees PagesEmployeesCompany(subsidiary sites) 110000Yahoo!(Hotjobs, Flickr, etc) 290000TimeWarner (AOL, CNN, Netscape, etc) 310000Google (YouTube, Blogger, etc) 470000Microsoft(MSN, Hotmail, etc) 550000News Corp (Myspace, Fox, IGN, etc) 612000eBay(Paypal, Skype, etc) 723craigslist(N/A) 825000BBC(N/A) 9130000Disney(ESPN, Go, ABC, etc) 1012000Amazon(IMDB, A9, etc) (english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps

7. Time Line 1995 Started with email in SA Public & Non-Commercial 1997 Approached by Microsoft for ad banner 1999 Moved to Commercial Charge for Business who posts JOB ads in SanFr, NY & LA 2004 eBay aquired 25% of equity from a former shareholder 2008 Local classified and forms for 570 cities in 50 countries worldwide More than 20 billion per month traffic Places 7th world wide in terms of english-language page view

8. All craigslist postings are free, except for:  Job posts in the San Francisco Bay AreaSan Francisco Bay Area  The fee for posting a job in the SF Bay Area is $75. This fee pays for one job in one category. (One job posted in two different categories would cost $150.)  Job posts in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, South Florida, and Washington DCAtlantaAustinBostonChicagoDallasDenverHoustonLos AngelesNew YorkOrange CountyPhiladelphiaPhoenixPortland SacramentoSan DiegoSeattleSouth FloridaWashington DC  The fee for posting a job in these cities is $25. This fee pays for one job in one category. (One job posted in two different categories would cost $50.)  Brokered apartment rental listings in New YorkNew York  The fee for posting a brokered apartment rental in New York City is $10.  Posts in adult services and therapeutic services on craigslist sites in the United States.  The fee for posting ads in these categories is $10. Live approved ads can be re-posted for $5

9. Statistics about the Traffic  Overall gender neutral- VERY slightly male  Fairly wealthy and educated  Car dealers, home services and Real estate – are the main posters  Age 25-44 dominate

10. Techinical and other challenges  Small team  Infrastructure gets creaky  Growth over years  Lack of abstractions  Too much embedded in SQL in code

11. Goals  Use Open Souurce  Keep infrastructure small and simple  Lower power is good  Efficiency all around  Do more with less  Keep the site easy and appraochable  Don‘t overload features  People are easly confused

12. Open Source  Craigslist has been using MySQL and the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) stack from the very start.  In less than 4 years, MySQL has enabled craigslist to grow from 250,000 page views to over 27 million page views daily - virtually all of which are generated out of MySQL!

13. Technical Environment Hardware Supermicro 4U 7043-P8 CPU Dual Intel Xeon 3.2 512KB OS Suse Linux RAM 4GB Hard Disk 36GB Storage Raid 10 with 6-10 disks Language Perl

14. Reasons to redesign it…  Creating a post is a long, convoluted process where the feedback is sent to you via email, not immediately on the screen  No standard template for posters to enter more detailed information, like size

15. Resources  (english language page view ranking by Alexa, headcounts from Yahoo! Finance). Sep 25th 2008 05:04 PM http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages_and_peeps  http://changethis.com/13.Craigslist http://changethis.com/13.Craigslist  Madslien, J. (2005, August 4). Craigslist's silent emergence. In BBC News. Retrieved October 9, 2006, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4724165.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4724165.stm  Buckmaster, Jim (6 March 2007). Craig's List aims to 'stay small'. In BBC News. from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6419461.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6419461.stm  http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/11/redesigning-craigslist- with-focus-on-usability/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/11/redesigning-craigslist- with-focus-on-usability/