From a Wired article, circa 2009 (so this may be out of date):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.
"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."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
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?