Why is craigslist going after people who bring them traffic? Is it because they don't bring in much money themselves so they have to sell licenses? I've never really thought about craigslists business model. I assume it's almost entirely ad based / premium placement of your ad on their site based.
From a Wired article, circa 2009 (so this may be out of date):
"Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either."
Usually, when companies get mad about scraping, it's because it's either bypassing the ads that make them money, or in rare cases bypassing a premium API. Here, PadMapper is doing neither.
In fact, if Craiglist is so committed to not updating their ugly website, why don't they just license out a public API, killing two birds (new monetization strategy and having a better interface for free) with one stone?
The first step to beating Craigslist at apartment listings is to get everyone to use a different front-end. (ie. Padmapper) Then you offer a way to create listings entirely within that front-end and bypass Craigslist entirely. CL becomes little more than a backend database, and eventually goes out of business as no one needs to use it anymore.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a smart business decision to me. It would just make sense to pursue this new revenue stream, and license out an API. This response just seems like more of an emotional response than a business strategy.
Edit: Not sure why this comment is getting down-voted, but if I offended some one that was not my intention.
The same reason facebook bought instagram: craigslist doesn't want any other web site's userbase to become the kernel for a replacement listing service.
Once you have a web site that attracts buyers, you can replace craigslist data with your own listing service and stop paying for their API.
They clearly don't fear this kind of competition in the mobile space, hence offering licenses for mobile-only API use.
Craiglist doesn't get traffic from PadMapper. PadMapper gets nearly all of its traffic from Craiglist. Craiglist can charge for mobile licenses because people want the traffic that Craiglist can bring them.
PadMapper gets no traffic from Craigslist. Craiglist gets traffic from PadMapper.
PadMapper is basically a pointer to a listing on Craigslist (when Craigslist listings are the reference), where you can search the pointers with filtering that you can't on Craigslist. In order to get to PadMapper, you have to visit the site directly.
