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Craigslist is an Enigma
Posted by Scott on 5th December, 2007 | 7 comments
So Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, gave the opening keynote this morning at PubCon. It was a good presentation and he gave a bit of history about Craigslist and talked about his changing role there. He mostly works in customer service now, handling fraud complaints.
Rumors online place Craigslist revenues at about $10M/year selling classified job postings and New York real estate postings on the site, but Craig said that they only sell 1% of their total postings. $10M for 1% of postings is not bad. The site also receives 5 Billion, with a B, page views per month. Craig stated that they have no intention of selling the site.
And herein lies the mystery: I understand the whole grass roots, foster community, keep it simple and pristine thing, but this site is an absolute untapped gold mine and that makes it very unique these days, perhaps with the exception of Wikipedia. With a CPM based ad model selling 20% of their inventory at a $0.50 CPM, they’d make $500k/month in ad revenue. Or, integrate Adsense on all page views, average a $0.50 CPM, and generate $2.5M/month. Instead of selling 1% of postings, sell 5% - that’s another $40M/year in revenue.
Point being: I think Craig Newmark could do a lot more good for the world in total if his company would commit into monetizing the site in a way that doesn’t offend its community. Donate all that extra money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or something if they want to, whatever. Just seems like a perfectly good waste of money, to me.
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Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 3:42 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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The reason it’s so popular is that it’s NOT monetized.
I don’t believe anyone would stop using it if they started selling 5% of postings instead of 1%, or added some inconspicuous adsense blocks. People use it because it works.
While I agree with you, I feel like the business is being run not out of greed but out of a desire to actually help people find what they want. I think the dude just isn’t interested in taking more than he really needs. Granted I’d NEVER do that personally, but you gotta respect them for that, and respect is hard to earn, and is also something this guy gets a ton of.
i think he should monetize it a bit more. if he doesn’t want to upset the craigslist hippies, he could set up a craigslist foundation to help the homeless in san fran or something.
Simplicity is all that matters, I guess though a little bit of monetization wouldn’t hurt.
Agreed. I saw an interview Newmark had with John Stewart, and I just couldn’t that he wasn’t interested in selling the site. What kind of price tag do you think Craigslist would have? It gives me goosebumps to think about it.
Amelie
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