Originally, craigslist only listed classifieds and announcements within San Francisco. As the service grew in popularity, expanding well beyond founder Craig Newmark's original concept, craigslist added other cities to its network. The first city to join the network was Boston in Today, more than cities have a craigslist community site.
Because community members largely moderate the sites, craigslist employees can focus their attention on coordinating transactions for job and housing posts, helping members troubleshoot problems and responding to reports of abuse or illegal behavior.
Without communal moderation, the craigslist staff would be severely overworked. The executive team at craigslist maintains that the reason for the site's success is the user community. The team believes that craigslist gives users a place to communicate and help one another, fostering community spirit. The site's emphasis on community reflects its founder's and CEO's values -- Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster try to avoid commercialism and corporate culture in their company [source: craigslist.
Craigslist communities appeal to a broad range of users. The simple, organized layout and helpful search engine makes navigation easy. Craigslist members range from teenagers to senior citizens. They post on the forums, shop online, trade tips and make new friends.
While the site itself may not be the most visually interesting Internet destination, there's no denying its effectiveness. Users often report that it's easy to find what they are searching for within a few minutes of logging on to the site. In the next section, we'll examine how the corporate structure at craigslist sets the tone for the entire site. Internet and telecommunications author Russell Shaw has theorized that craigslist is contributing to the decline of print journalism.
Shaw argues that by charging below-market prices for housing and job postings, craigslist takes revenue away from newspapers, which, in turn, means that papers have to set salaries lower. Papers can't afford to hire good journalists, and the effects trickle down into substandard reporting [source: Russell Shaw ]. Craigslist started as a pet project but blossomed into a full-fledged company.
In , craigslist incorporated as a for-profit organization. The company also purchased the domain craigslist. Each year since then, craigslist has expanded to cover more cities and communities, becoming a powerful financial force in the process. Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster aren't your typical corporate bigwigs. Even though Newmark is the founder and chairman of craigslist, he states his title as customer service representative.
Buckmaster is not only the CEO but also a lead developer for the site. He helped design the homepage, Web architecture, forums, community moderation system, personals category and search engine. Newmark and Buckmaster strive to keep craigslist a service-based company focused on online communities. They have refused offers to sell the company for a huge profit. Many of their decisions fly in the face of traditional business strategies, but Newmark has said that keeping the communal culture of craigslist intact is more important than making enormous profits [source: craigslist.
Even the site's offices are unusual for an Internet company -- instead of a flashy office in a building made of glass and steel , craigslist's headquarters are in an old Victorian storefront in San Francisco [source: Associated Press ]. The site earns revenue by setting fees for job postings in a few cities and for apartment listings in New York City. The fee authorizes the user to post a job in one category -- if the user wishes to post the same job in multiple categories, he or she must pay a fee for each one.
Job and housing ads in other cities are free. The site generates enough revenue to support its entire staff of 25 people. Apart from paid classifieds in the aforementioned cities, craigslist features no advertising at all. It doesn't sell advertising space for banner ads , pop-up ads or any other kind of web advertising.
Newmark says he doesn't intend to use any kind of web advertising on craigslist in the future [source: craigslist. Though craigslist's corporate philosophy focuses on making a positive impact in the community, not everyone using the site shares that point of view. Some craigslist members use the site to take advantage of other people. However, Newmark's philosophy of keeping things simple has caused Craigslist to rival eBay and Amazon in number of online users wanting to buy and sell.
While eBay and Amazon are public companies with thousands of employees, Craigslist is a private company with less than three dozen. See Angie's list. Internet, informal To advertise a product or service on the Craigslist website. Origin of craigslist. Craigslist Sentence Examples.
Later, in '84, I read Neuromancer , by William Gibson. That vision of what cyberspace could be, and the way regular people--having no power or influence--could work together to accumulate power from the grass roots up kicked off the imaginations of many people.
I started seeing that vision again in the early '90s. I'd started spending time on the WELL, a small but highly influential virtual community. I left IBM and went to Schwab in , and it had a brown-bag-luncheon series where I went around the company saying, "Here's the internet. It's going to be how we do business someday. Craigslist is now in cities in some countries, and remains one of the most-trafficked sites in the U. But it began with a single email in you simply shared interesting things going on in San Francisco.
What was in that first email? The first ones had to do with two events: Joe's Digital Diner, where people would show the use of multimedia technology. It was just emerging then. Around a dozen of us would come and have dinner--always spaghetti and meatballs--around a big table. And a party called the Anon Salon, which was very theatrical but also technology focused.
People just kept emailing me asking for their addresses to be added to the cc list , or eventually to the listserv. As tasks started getting onerous, I would usually write some code to automate them. And I just kept listening. At first, the email was just arts and technology events. Then people asked if I could pass on a post about a job or something for sale.
I could sense an apartment shortage growing, so I asked people to send apartment notices, too. By the end of It was still just me, and at the end of that year I hit about a million page views per month, which was big then. Microsoft Sidewalk [an ill-fated network of online city guides] wanted to run banner ads. But a theme coalescing in my head was: People were already paying too much for less-effective ads, so we could provide a simple platform where the ads would be more effective and yet people would pay less.
That made sense at the time and has worked out pretty well. I was getting increasingly serious about the site and had gotten some volunteer help, but at the end of , some people who had been using the site for years told me at lunch, "Hey, volunteering isn't working. You gotta get real. You gotta make the site into something reliable.
I had been in denial. I could see things starting to not work. Postings didn't get done in a timely way; the database didn't get pruned of old listings in a consistent way. Trying to run a business collecting fees for job postings--I couldn't make it work on a volunteer basis. Maybe someone with better leadership skills could have, but I couldn't.
So I had to get real and go full time. I had to commit. I left what I was doing--programming for a company called Continuity Solutions, which was doing some interesting technology for customer service--and I made Craigslist into a company in early ' I was talking to a lot of bankers and VCs, socially. They were beginning to fantasize about the way the internet could happen. They were telling me to do the normal Silicon Valley thing: monetize everything. They were saying that this could be a billion-dollar company.
But I had already made the decision to not highly monetize when I turned down the banner ads. I had trouble making tough decisions. I was not any good at the job interview process, and I made mistakes. I found it very difficult to fire anyone. I didn't make major decisions that required some boldness, like adding new cities. I knew we needed to expand in that way, but I guess I didn't have the guts to do it.
I thought, for example, that maybe we needed to do some advertising. In an HR magazine, for job postings. So I hired someone to do marketing, and put up a couple of ads, and that was just a wasted effort.
Word of mouth is what really worked. I realized that he could run things better than I could. I was able, to some extent, to divorce my ego from my CEO role. And I'd had a lot of lessons.
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