Craigslist Going Global (Sorta)

Craigslist has been replicating itself across every major US city for the past few years, enjoying tremendous success along the way. Naturally, it only makes sense that the company start tackling some non-US cities.

Wisely, the company began with English-speaking cites, such as London and Melbourne. But as the folks at eBay, Amazon and others can attest, English can only take a company so far.

Craiglist is now offering Web sites for Paris and Tokyo. However, the ventures are only limited to English. But the Paris site, shown here, notes that French is coming…

craigslist_fr.jpg

It will be very interesting to see how successfully Craigslist handles the new languages and character sets. One thing in its favor is its graphics-free Web design; this makes for faster localization and a fast-loading Web page. In many parts of the world people still pay for Internet access by the minute, so a fast-loading Web page is competitive advantage. Craigslist has taken a page from Google’s playbook.

Thanks to Hylton via Poynter for the heads up on this.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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