At the Structure '08 conference, one of the eBay guys made the comment that scalability was a solved problem for them. A fellow conference goer observed:
airplanedan: must be nice to be ebay… James Barrese says they have scaling figured out and never have to worry about it again #structure08
This comment made me curious… Growth obviously makes scalability really hard, and how much is eBay growing anyway?? After pulling up a couple charges, in particular comparing things to Craigslist, you see some interesting results.
According to Compete, Craigslist has grown 76% in the last year while eBay has declined 11.6%:
If that pace continues – and your high schools stats warned you about the dangers of extrapolating- then Craigslist will pass eBay within the year. Wow! That would be big.
That means Craigslist will not only be the bane of all the old media newspapers, but also a former dotcom darling.
Here's the Quantcast graph for another datapoint:
