Cumulative activity for the site

 

Comparision of size of Community listings on CraigsList for various city sites.
Fig. 1 shows count of the CraigsList postings in the Community area for each city (we took the square root of the total to compress scales). Fig. 2 compares the average counts of each CraigsList Community with the number of responses from our postings in each community for the days immediately following a posting until the occurance of the next posting.
This is an experimental process, and we will be adding postings to all the CraigsList community sites in 2004 to fill in the blanks. CraigsList rules allow us to add a new posting once every 2 days, so data collection is slow. We don't always post at exact intervals (typically a 2 to 5 day range). Listings stay on very high traffic sites for only 10 days (SF, NYC, LA, Boston), 30 days on medium traffic sites, and 45 days on low traffic sites. We presume this is in order to reduce the server loading on larger sites while allowing smaller sites to keep postings up longer to improve number of pageviews. Our experience in San Francisco is that response falls off rapidly after the first 36 hours due to the high volume of listings (well over 1,000) per day. As a contrast, New Orleans might average 10/day (March 2004). Since the listings stay on lower traffic city sites longer, there is a residual side effect that we have not isolated in this chart. At some future time we may attempt to formally analyze the raw log data to obtain geographic information that can more accurately reflect the effects of specific actions.

6/18/04 Fig. 1

The data above was NOT officially supplied by CL.

6/18/04 Fig. 2

Comments thus far: Postings on CraigsList can be effective as a means of advertising, though one must be careful to stay within the guidelines to avoid abuse of the posting privilage. It is important to remember that CraigsList is defined as a cluster of individual local metropolitan communities, not one large global entity. Our approach is to visit each of these communities, one at a time, much as a traveling circus might come to town. Sometimes a visit stimulates activity and discussion within that community, other times it goes almost unnoticed. The only way we know whether we've had an impact on you is to send us a comment.

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