Over at PBS, Bob Cringely recently stepped up to his pulpit to talk about the influence of Craigslist on the current poor outlook for newspapers. Basically, his argument is that Craigslist's free ads attack the "bread and butter" revenue of newspaper classifieds. He's right but that's not what I wanted to share with you.
What I wanted to share is this gem of a statement from Bob's analysis of why Craigslist is succeeding so well:
"That success couldn't be simpler: FREE has a mystique that is hard to fight. That makes Craigslist Linux to eBay's Windows.:
Mystical, beautiful and powerful.
Hotmail was/is free email. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia. And Craiglist is free classifieds. All three are huge successes.
What could you do for "free" that would attack a profit center of your competition and at the same time serve as a powerful marketing tool for your company?
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