craigslist – Disruptive business model ?

Read an article on craigslist in The Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com) today – the article was titled “Craigslist goes Capitalist”. These guys totally changed the rules of internet advertising. They offer huge amount of yellow pages services free!! How does one compete with free services?!! They were able to amass huge audience base using tons of valuable but mostly free localized services and a simple easy to use website. Along with google and others, they may have disrupted the ad industry linked to yellow pages, pamphlets or newspapers. This latter group, which easily qualifies as a rapidly dying entity, naturally loved it when Craigslist recently sued EBay for diluting the 28.4% equity which EBay holds in craigslist. This essentially validated the general belief in craigslist competitors that craigslist is not really a charitable operation but rather harbors a secret profit objective.

Anyway, the point is that the way these new internet businesses have disrupted existing century-old models continues to be a subject of wonder and awe. Speaking of disruptive business models, shall we start talking about free music now..well maybe another time.