March 05, 2008

Craigslist Traffic Nearly Doubles Year on Year

Craigslist traffic just keeps climbing. Year on year last week, share of US visits to Craigslist.org were up 93%. And it's not just traffic to the main Craigslist page, share of US Internet visits to the Hitwise Classifieds category, which is dominated by Craigslist properties, grew 137% year on year last week. (We track each city separately, so for example the San Francisco, Sacramento, Boston and New York Craigslists are all counted separately). Craigslist.org ranked #23 last week based on share of US Internet visits up from #25 a month ago, #29 three months ago and #39 a year ago. As you can see from the chart below, the growth is steady and fairly constant.

What accounts for the growth?

The answer is in part - increased awareness of Craigslist, as indicated by an increase in searches for the service. The search term "craigslist" was the fourth highest volume search term last week, based on share of US Internet searches, beat out only by "myspace", "ebay" and "myspace.com". The search term accounted for one in every 357 queries last week. Searches for "craigslist" overtook searches for "youtube" in September and for "mapquest" in July.

I had a theory to explain the growth in visits and searches - growth in newer cities. Craigslist was started in San Francisco and rapidly spread across the country. However, the website's popularity may be increasing in some newer states. I looked at demographic data, specifically state, to see if we've seen any major shifts in the past year. As you would suspect, the largest share of visits to Craigslist comes from Internet users in California. In the past four weeks, 30% of US visits were from households in California. That is down 32% year on year. So, while California is still the top state for Craigslist, the concentration of traffic from California is decreasing. My theory may prove correct...

Last year, the second largest state, in share of US visits to Craigslist.org was Washington accounting for 5% of visits, followed by Oregon and New York. This year, the second largest state was Texas, followed by Florida and New York. US Visits to Craigslist.org from Texas were up 31% and from Florida up 67%. This indicates that growth is being fueled by increasing popularity of Craigslist in newer cities.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:23 AM
Posted to Shopping & Classifieds

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Posted by: PJ Brunet at March 6, 2008 04:26 AM

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