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

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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.
  

Graph of top porn/adult sites in Alexa Top 1000

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As was promised earlier, here I share the top adult sites on alexa...

The graph shows a few of the sites.
To see the complete list of adult sites, you can go here...



I suppose the interesting thing about these sites is they do span a bunch of different categories. Clearly video is the most popular category, but you can see file sharing sites, social networks, advertising networks and publishers (sites which try to do everything)

Porn dominates top 1000 sites on Alexa

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Porn dominates the top 1000 sites on Alexa. Almost 8% of the top 1000 sites were primarily adult content. I don't think this is a surprise (although this is a higher number than what I initially expected about the top alexa sites). Most people probably already know that porn is the most prevalent content on the web. But it still amazes me how many sites which are all pretty similar can co-exist and thrive. There were 79 porn sites in the top 1000 in alexa - and here I am talking about pure porn sites. If you start including all the picture sharing and file sharing sites (I am told a site like flickr has almost 50% porn content), where porn is also "one of the major" pieces of content, that number would rise dramatically.

So what are the learnings?
1. If you are looking to make some quick bucks, you probably have the highest chance of success if you engage in porn business
2. Advertising networks like adbrite are probably doing excellent business because they have unabashedly supported porn sites.
3. Even if you are trying to execute some non-porn website/idea, you are better off using porn as a "door to the customer"

The list of top adult sites on alexa is here.

And yeah, why is this my first analysis from the list? simply because it's so much easier to identify porn sites compared to any other type... (foreign, english doesn't matter - its pretty easy to identify a naked chick on any site)