craigslist blog

CL users in the US were up 76% from last June, to nearly 40 million.

Thats a lot of peeps. Welcome newcomers!

For garage & yard sales:

Site-wide average page download speeds (in seconds) for selected sites:

0.6 craigslist
1.2 google
1.7 aol
1.9 wikipedia
2.0 facebook
2.2 yahoo
2.5 msn
3.6 myspace
5.0 amazon

Data courtesy of Alexa.com

According to this recent study the average American smartphone user spends more of her total web browsing time on craigslist than on any other site.

Rock on average American smartphone user!

“Cars and trucks” and “Recreational Vehicles” listings in our For Sale section are up 120% and 100% respectively in just the last 8 months, a trend that is accelerating into March and April.

Comscore has released search rankings for March, listing craigslist as the #8 search company overall in terms of search volume, with the highest year-over-year growth rate in searches:

Serving 10 billion page views on a few hundred servers, craigslist leads the internet industry by orders of magnitude when it comes to efficient use of electricity. The last time I checked we were clocking something like 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.

Compare this to single digit thousands of pages-per-kwhr for most large sites, which typically run tens to hundreds of thousands of servers.

Have said it before, and will say it again: pound-for-pound our tech team is the best in the business.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so, judging by the fruitless attempts other internet companies (who will remain nameless for now) have made to pluck them away.

In early March we implemented a phone verification system for our “erotic services” category, which taken together with other measures has reduced the volume of ads in this category by 80%, and more importantly has signficantly improved compliance with our terms of use and other posted guidelines.

For example, here is a graph of the daily volume of “erotic services” ads submitted to the Hartford, Connecticut site: