Four months ago Craigslist pulled the Adult Services section on its US websites. Quietly, without fanfare or announcement, but all the same they were gone. Then at the very end of the year the company confirmed that the section had been removed from its sites worldwide (slightly oddly, since it was pressure from US Attorneys General that caused the original change, but all the same they're gone too).
The removal of the section was estimated by AIM Group to cost Craigslist $36m pa or about a third of its total revenue. But for a company that famously doesn't care about the money, this can hardly be a significant issue. What matters is whether it costs them traffic and the opportunity to connect people with the services they want to find.
Happily the negative impact on traffic appears to have been negligible. Yes,
traffic to the site has fallen approximately 30% over the past three months, recovering with a 15% uptick in the last seven days...but that's consistent with the trajectory of the seasonal decline at Craigslist during the same period last year, as well as the seasonal decline at similar general free classified sites (
Gumtree) or paid classified sites operating in Craigslist's verticals (
Monster,
Rightmove). Classified sites in this space just fall over the winter as people stop looking for jobs and houses, and then pick up again around 1st Jan as everyone starts making new plans for the new year.
So it's a shame that the censors got the Craigslist, and let their moral panic deprive local law-enforcement of a valuable resource for catching incompetent human traffickers by scaring them off to less helpful sites. But it hasn't done any real harm to Craigslist, which over the past seven days alone has seen traffic tick up more than 15%.
(All figures taken from Alexa, which has its limitations but is normally directionally accurate.)
Recent Comments