economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3291632
E-mail this Craigslist Honouring nerd values Oct 14th 2004 | SAN FRANCISCO From The Economist print edition An online phenomenon becomes an official one Gene X Hwang-Orange Photography Gene X Hwang-Orange Photography IT WAS officially Craigslist day in San Francisco on October 10th. But even Craig Newmarkhe of the listhad to admit that not terribly much h appened. org, a plain but packed online bulletin board, has tran sformed the lives of many inhabitants of California's Bay Area since it started in 1995. Some people assemble their entire lives on our site, says Mr Newmark, l ike a proud father. Indeed there are San Franciscans who have found thei r spouse, job, house and pet on Craigslist. The top two categories among its 3m classified ads in any given month are for job vacancies (23%) an d accommodation (21%). The lady, for instance, who found solace among other owners of diabetic cats. Or the g ay amateur porn star who seeks customers for his full-service massages. With 1 billion page views a month, mostly from the Bay Area and New York, this is the sort of success that most dotcoms can only dream about. Our main purpose is to be a public service, says Jim Buckmaster, whom Mr Newmark brought in as chief executive in 2000 (the d ivision of labour being that Jim does everything that requires being ta ll, while I stand on a stool in pictures, says Mr Newmark, who is const itutionally unable to speak without humour). Craigslist is officially re gistered as a for-profit company and it does make money. But, says Mr Bu ckmaster, the org indicates intent, in the sense that we're like a comm ons in medieval England.
Mr Buckmaster and Mr Newmark say these things with total credibility. A d eciding moment occurred in 1997, when Microsoft offered a lot of money t o place banner ads on the site. Mr Newmark thought about it for a nanose cond, then turned the offer down. Instead, all the moneyhe will not say how muchstill comes exclusively from employers advertising job vacanci es; This generates, even if it sounds sappy, a genuine sense of community. Instead, Mr Newmark and Mr Buckmaster read e-mails from S an Franciscans who moved to Anchorage or Edinburgh and whined because th ere were no Craigslists there. Starting a site for a new city is easy an d essentially cost-free, says Mr Buckmaster, since all they do is provid e a web page and some rules. The new community then builds itself from t he ground up. Thus Craigslist is now in 57 cities and five countries, bu t has only 14 employees working out of a flat in San Francisco. We don't think of ourselves as a brand, says Mr Buckmaster. Nevertheles s many of the big and more commercially minded dotcoms have had their ey e on Craigslist for a while. Recently eBay, the world's biggest online-a uction site, got to the front of the queue and grabbed a 25% stake when a Craigslist shareholder sold out. For us, it's about learning, says Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. For Mr Newmark, the thing to understand is really quite simple. He is a n erd, he is proud to say, and thus exhibits the same dysfunction as my n erd brethren. Ultimately, this comes down to steadfastly following ner d values: once you make enough money, it's time to improve the world.
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