Craigslist is an American website for classified advertisements in the areas of housing, jobs, items wanted, for sale items, resumes, gigs, community service, and discussion forums. For a long time now, the brand has commanded a huge share of the market in classified advertisements.
The following SWOT analysis will present insights on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Craigslist.
Craigslist – At a Glance
| Name | Craigslist |
| Website | https://www.craigslist.org/ |
| Founders | Craig Newmark |
| Chief Executive Officer (C.E.O.) | Jim Buckmaster |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S |
| Type of Corporation | Public |
| Year Founded | 1995 |
| Key Products/Services | Online classified advertisements with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums |
| Key Competitors | Facebook, OfferUp, Locanto, Letgo, Swappa, Geebo, Oodle, OLX, and eBay |
Strengths of Craigslist
Strong Popularity
SimilarWeb.com ranks Craigslist as the 67th most popular website globally. It is the 22nd most popular website in the US and 1st populous in the classified segment.
High popularity guarantees increased customer recognition, more customer loyalty, and enhanced credibility. With this increased brand awareness, the brand can easily introduce new products to the market.
High Traffic
Many individuals and brands seeking to advertise their products are attracted to Craigslist since the site boasts of heavy traffic of millions of visitors every month and as well billions of new ads are posted monthly. This provides users of the platform with a wide viewership and audience.
Strict Controls and Standards
Craigslist has very stringent policies and regulations for posting on the site. The brand strictly adheres to standards and conduct requirements to help curb the growth of spam ads and inappropriate ads; they are detected swiftly and flagged down. This goes to strengthen the quality of the Craigslist platform.
Success Track Record of Launching New Products
Craigslist invests heavily in its community and customer data from where it derives pertinent insights from its local customer base. This enhances its success in launching new products in the market and also catering to its multiple markets.
Strong Product
Craigslist provides its customer with an efficient, trustworthy, and relatively non-commercial platform for them to find basic services in their locality. These offerings are free to individuals. This product meets the pertinent needs of a market thus attracting more customers to the product. Users of Craigslist have the advantage of managing a schedule of posting and reposting to achieve a maximum familiarity effect on the customer’s brains.
Using a calendar to schedule these posting or acquiring software that would help with automatic reposting helps enhance users’ experience on the platform. Customers need to see an advertisement over and over before the brand registers on the customer’s brain. In addition, Craigslist endeavors to ensure a spam-free platform for its users.
Free Product
Many customers are attracted to Craigslist given they can freely advertise their products, jobs, and properties among other items. This helps many brands make the most of their advertisement campaign’s budgets that more often are tight.
Every marketing team has an opportunity to leverage Craigslist’s free options to reach out to customers.
Weaknesses of Craigslist
Bad Past Reputation
The brand’s past reputation has kept on haunting the brand. Craigslist in the past ran a section on ‘personals’ that was perceived to enable sex trafficking. Following the passing of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, the brand had to pull down the ‘personals’ section from its website.
The section was notorious and earned a bad name for enabling drug trafficking, and sex trafficking among others. And while the brand pulled down the particular section, the bad reputation still haunts the brand to date.
Spam ads on Platform
Craigslist has put in more effort to see the detection and prevention of spam ads on the platform, however, this problem has remained persistent. This is one of the major weaknesses of the platform. Customers encounter many spam ads that one could hardly distinguish from the real ads.
Spam ads diminish the credibility and usability of the platform as it jeopardizes the safety of sellers and buyers too on the platform. There is every need for craigslist to continue with its war on curbing spam ads on its platform.
Difficulty in Search of Items
Craigslist allows users on the platform to classify their ads under different sections. Finding the right section, however, can be challenging particularly for the less advanced users of the platform. Some users have found it had to fit in their ads in the predefined categories already established by the brand.
The end result for some users has been difficulty and confusion trying to find particular ads on the platform.
Opportunities of Craigslist
More Revenue Generation
The brand has an opportunity to define more revenue-generating avenues on its platform. This has some element of risk as there are customers who are sensitive to price and such a move could have them move out of the platform.
The brand will therefore need to creatively create an acceptable pricing model that will enhance the brand’s revenues while at the same time serving customer categories that are price sensitive.
Growth in Un-entered Countries
Craigslist has its operations in about 80 countries. There are many other countries like India that have a fertile market for classified advertisements. In other markets where Craigslist is present, it hasn’t made a significant impact against its competitors like OLX. Such competitors are way ahead of Craigslist in those markets.
Craigslist needs to strengthen its appeal in the market through superior customer experience on its platform to enable it to capture more market share in particular markets.
Threats of Craigslist
Low Barriers to Entry
The online classified advertisement market has very low barriers to entry. New companies are coming up and taking up part of Craigslist’s market share. And while the brand is well known globally, the advances of the new entrants into the market pose a great threat of diminishing the brand’s market share.
Cyber Security
Increased fake and spam ads on the platform are a sure threat to the survival of the brand. With every case of fraudulent, fake, and spam ads, the credibility of the brand keeps diminishing. With a lack of trust in a brand, there is a high likelihood that many customers will shy off from using the platform.
This will reduce traffic to the website, and if this reduction is significant, the brand will have lesser users interested in posting their ads on Craigslist, a trend that may slow down the brand’s profitability and revenues.
Conclusion
Craigslist has done a tremendous job in the market to have survived this far. The brand has a strong brand name, strong market recognition with many opportunities to penetrate new markets and earn more revenues.
The brand however needs to continuously work on its platform to strengthen the brand credibility, bring in more innovation into the platform and enable more visibility of search items on the platform.
