Story of CraigsList and Its Founder Craig Newmark
70Wired Magazine had an excellent and detailed history of the company CraigsList titled "Why Craigslist Is Such as Mess" written by Gary Wolf.
CraigsList.org Is a community website where people can post ads such as looking for jobs, looking to hire, looking for apartment, looking for love, etc. The website was started by founder Craig Newman, who had maintained a mailing list prior to that which evolved into a website. Hence the name Craigslist. CraigsList was started in 1995 in San Francisco.
What is the Revenue of CraigsList?
Most of the posting is free to the user, except for certain job ads or apartment listing posting in certain cities that requires a fee to post.
You might wonder whether a site that was primarily free would make any money? Many people wondered that too. And when interviewers tries to get any kind of answer from Newmark to any kind of financial related questions, they often get nowhere. The farthest that interviewer Charlie Rose got was that Newmark owns less than 50% of Craigslist.[1] (eBay owns approximately a quarter of CraigsList because a former Craigs list employee sold his portion of the ownership to eBay.)
But 50% of how much? How much revenue does Craiglist bring in in a year? A consulting firm estimates (by counting paid ads) that revenue could be as much as $100 million in 2009.[1] Wikipedia reports numbers like "from $10 million in 2004, $20 million in 2005, and $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007"[2]
Wow, the Traffic
That means that there must be quite a lot of ads. And for sure there are. One million new job listings each month. With about 20 billion page views per month, it ranks 22nd in traffic among the world's websites.[2]
The statistics are so astounding that I have to just quote directly from the article: "Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30. ... Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many."[1]
Website traffic changes all the time. A check of Alexa traffic rank on September 11, 2009 shows Craigslist ranking 26. eBay leading with a rank of 23. And amazon trailing with a rank of 29. Google usually takes first place with a Alexa rank of 1.
No interest in monetizing
But perhaps Craig Newmark was genuinely disinterested in money. In this video interview, Newmark says "not interested in selling, not interested in monetizing in any way".
Current CEO of Craigslist, Jim Buckmaster, is also reported as saying, "Companies looking to maximize revenue need to throw as many revenue-generating opportunities at users as they will tolerate. We have absolutely no interest in doing that, which I think has been instrumental to the success of craigslist."[1]
Craigslist.org is not a fancy website nor does it have any fancy features. There is no fancy office either. See for yourself this picture of CraigsList San Francisco headquarters. There is no HR department. There is no advertising department. And there is no sales and marketing department. Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting.
Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster works in the same office room with desks arranged facing away from each other. Buckmaster had posted his resume on CraigsList.org and Newmark found it. Hired as a programmer and after working at craigslist for year, Buckmaster just happen to become CEO.
Its Problems
Of course craigslist has it problems too. Any website with this kind of huge exposure to the public must have. There are some spam, fraud, and scams on CraigsList. And there are lawsuits filed too.
Critics says that CraigsList is used as medium for prostitution ads. MSNBC went undercover to investigate -- you can see Today's Show video and story as reported on HuffingtonPost.com.
And then there are ads on CraigsList that are posted by legitimate users that can attract criminals like robbers. MSNBC reports of a story where a father was shot when robbers answered his CraigsList ad where he was trying to sell a thousand-dollar diamond ring (at his home).
To hear CraigsList side of the things, you can visit their blog at blog.craigslist.org. Starting in 2009, Craigslist does manual screening of adult services ads as well as take other measures as mentioned in May 11th, 2010 blog entry. It also says ...
"While quite rare on craigslist, any ad on our site in facilitation of such an unspeakable crime is completely unacceptable, and we will continue to work tirelessly with law enforcement to ensure that any such victim receives the assistance they deserve and that anyone responsible for such a crime is imprisoned. ... If we for one moment believed our labor of love was increasing the incidence of such a heinous crime or was contributing to the suffering of its victims, we would indeed have trouble sleeping."
CraigsList is just a medium for the public (just like a newspaper) and so will have the good and the bad from the public. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides websites with a certain level of protection against liability resulting from a user's posting. The reason being that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."[ref]
Founder Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark was listed on Inc Magazine as one of 26 most fascinating entrepreneurs even back in 2005.
Another fun video of an interview of Craig Newmark on the right where Craig does a little song. CBS News interviewed Newmark in 2007 in this video.
Apparently he drives a Prius.
Craig Newmark's blog is at cnewmark.com
In 2008, Craig gave a talk (full video linked here) at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He gave an overview of Craigslist history and how it became. Because this is at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he also goes into the technology of CraigsList, which turns out to be not so fancy. They started with "pine folders" as the "database" and then went into using MySQL database later.
Craig got a B.S. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. Craig also talked a little about himself. He also mentions he is not good at managing people. So that is why Jim is CEO and basically runs CraigsList. Craig also does customer support.
References
