Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Craigslist - "For sale" and "Men Seeking Men" are very popular

Just taking a short break from my alexa analysis...I thought I'll dig a bit deeper into craigslist. Craigslist, for the uninitiated, is an insanely popular local site. But what do people really do on it?

According to alexa, 88% of the traffic of craigslist is from the US. And within the US, the city wide breakup is:

SF Bay Area 13%
New York 8%
Los Angeles 7%
Seattle 4%
San Diego 3%
Chicago 3%
Boston 3%


Now, within the above mentioned cities, which sections on Craigslist are most active?
Let's compare two of the more popular cities on Craigslist:

Over a period of the last 7 days, the level of activity in various sections in San Francisco and New York were as follows:

San Francisco

New York





Community 906
Community 10609
Personals:

Personals:
Strictly Platonic 1035
Strictly Platonic 1240
Women seeking Women 6112
Women seeking Women 570
Women seeking Men 1070
Women seeking Men 1510
Men seeking Women 4001
Men seeking Women 7007
Men seeking Men 11015
Men seeking Men 16160
Misc Romance 232
Misc Romance 229
Casual Encounters 11604
Casual Encounters 14370
Missed Connections 1684
Missed Connections 1550
Total 31253
Total 42636
Rants and Raves 3913
Rants and Raves 3560
Housing 31570
Housing 69540
Jobs 7685
Jobs 7304
For Sale 132750
For Sale 72760
Services 27550
Services 36140



So what conclusions can one draw from the above tables?

  • Clearly the 2 cities exhibit very similar patterns.
  • Most people use craigslist to buy and sell stuff(hardly a surprise! That was the first reason why I had started using craigslist) San Francisco did have a little disproportionately high number of postings in this category compared to NYC. What does this say? Maybe San Franciscans get bored of their stuff quickly?
  • Men seeking Men is the Personals sub-category which uses craigslist the most. I was a little intrigued by that one. It is possible that this might be an anomaly given that San Francisco and New York are famously gay cities. I'll check this trend in other cities.
  • From what I understand, job postings are the major sources of revenue for craigslist. However the number of postings in the job section were not that high (compared to the other sections). However, based on the above data, we can't really conclude if the number of viewers of this section is lower or higher than the other categories.


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