All sides acknowledged it was a culture clash of the first order, as
Craigslist presented its story to a
Media Week audience of sharp-pencil analysts and investors.
Despite the .org in its domain address, and even though maximizing revenues is not a company objective, the wildly successful free classified service
is a profitable business.
The company receives more than 1,000 proposals a year for joint ventures and, except for an arrangement with
eBay, has politely declined them all. "We have a culture of doing our own thing," said CEO
Jim Buckmaster.
Have he and founder
Craig Newmark ever thought about monetizing the business and using the proceeds to do good philanthropically? "That's a valid question," Buckmaster replied. "It's a good model but it's not ours." They figure they are doing good by helping users find what they are looking for and saving money. (Craigslist also operates the
Craigslist Foundation, which
educates leaders of nonprofit organizations and helps them connect to each other.)
Buckmaster made something of a counter-cultural statement before saying a word. Basketball-player tall and sporting some stubbly facial hair, he wore an open-collared shirt, leather jacket and jeans. UBS Investment Bank's Ben Schachter, host analyst for the session, said Buckmaster had dropped out of medical school to join an Ann Arbor commune and answered a job posting for a programmer at Craigslist. With a year, he was CEO.
Craigslist ranks seventh in page views among all English-language Web sites,
according to an October update on its Web site, and does that with just 23 employees. Its income is derived from charging employers for job listings in seven big cities and apartment brokers in New York for the ads they place. Having enough computer capacity to keep up with the exploding volume has not proven a major problem, Buckmaster said. What is harder is finding enough electrical power in one place to run them.
Buckmaster was prepared for the inevitable question of whether he and Craig are prime suspects in killing the newspaper business. "A lot has been written about that," he said, "and we are part of the landscape of challenges newspapers face. In our view, the bigger problem is the high debt loads (they carry). Besides, it's a $60-billion industry, still rising slowly. The demise of newspapers has been overstated."
