Don’t be surprised if the people behind Craigslist and other classifieds sites are secretly hoping for a repeat of the Great Depression. New stats from Hitwise have arrived, and they show that Craigslist’s already-significant market share is increasing in such a way that it almost resembles a hockey stick.
A report Hitwise emailed to Murdok reads, “The market share of U.S. Internet visits increased 90 percent to the Craigslist Cities custom category year-over-year in February 2009, while visits to All Other Classifieds grew 22 percent. Visits to All Other Classifieds had been declining for most of 2008, with visits starting to increase in January and February.”
So it seems the recession is more or less rescuing some classifieds sites while acting as a rocket booster for Craigslist. This meshes well with last week’s info about Craigslist replacing MySpace as the top U.S. search term.
It’ll be interesting to see how classifieds companies respond to all of the attention. They might put their sites in stasis, afraid to change anything and lose traffic. Or some may churn out upgrades in the hopes of impressing people and keeping them around after the economy recovers.
Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty seemed to back the idea that we’ll see some long-term effects, stating, “Currently the economy is driving the growth among online classifieds, but satisfied buyers may continue to turn to the Web sites when researching purchases.”
