Craig the King of Classifieds

While Craig Newmark would undoubtedly bristle at that characterization, the network of sites that bears his name is the undisputed king of online classifieds (not counting eBay).

According to a report put out by Pew, using comScore data, traffic to classifieds-oriented Web sites has grown 80% in the past year (much greater than the 7% growth of the total U.S. Internet population). Craigslist in particular had almost 9 million uniques in September.

The top online classifieds sites (traffic volume) in September 2005 were the following:

• Craigslist.org
• Trader Publishing Co.
• Cars.com
• Apartments.com
• Abracat Property
• Homescape.com
• PuppyDogWeb.com
• LiveDeal.com
• Tribe Networks
• RegionalHelpWanted.com Sites
• Yahoo! Classifieds
• USCity.net
• BackPage.com
• MySpace Classifieds
• Hoobly.com

Trader Publishing had nearly as many uniques as Craigslist. But after Trader, Cars.com and Apartments.com had less than half the traffic of Craigslist, and the numbers drop off considerably from there.

The Pew report also found that about one in six online users in the U.S. had sold something online.

Here are a couple of quick thoughts. Tribe is doing better than I thought, and look at PuppyDogWeb (who had ever heard of that site?– obviously lots of people). And now the almost perfunctory statement: There aren't any newspapers represented here (although Tribe is partly newspaper owned, and Cars.com and Apartments.com are owned by Classified Ventures).

Print newspaper classified advertising was a $16.6 billion industry in 2004. What's going to happen to that revenue as more consumers (per the Pew/comScore data) shop for cars, jobs and real estate online?

ILM:05 has a panel on classifieds, "The Future of Classifieds in a World of Free," featuring Steve Harmon, VP, Business Development, LiveDeal.com; Leif Welch, VP, Business Development, AdMission Corp.; and Peter Zollman, Founder, Classified Intelligence.

It should be quite interesting.