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Craigslist Eyed for Possible Future IPO

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the drooling-investors dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Eric Hellweg wonders if everyone's favorite want-ad site will join the ranks of eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and, yes, Google. Hellweg guesses it makes $25 million a year by charging for only 12 percent of its ads. If it ramped up payments on more ads throughout its many-city network, it could hit $100 million. That's a monster margin for a 14-person staff! And they may even consider going public."

8 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Craig Newmark, awesome human being by ortcutt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Craig Newmark is an awesome human being. Check out his blog. He's not only an open-source software user (SuSE on a Thinkpad T40) and the creator of the largest and most useful (and OSS-based) community bulletin board in the world, but also a progressive Democrat and all-around humanitarian.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. RTFA by ortcutt · · Score: 3, Informative

    The article is a speculation about what might or would happen if Craigslist did go public. The Craislist CEO points out that, "We have no plans to go public." So, I'll be really disappointed if people post things claiming the Craigslist is selling out, because that would mean that you didn't RTFA.

  4. Re:The article is mostly pontificated crap. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Craig was talking about the possibility 5 years ago, shortly before the market went bust. If there was serious money to be made, I don't think he would hesitate.

  5. There are many sites out there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not to mention that there is a lot of competition on the internet.

    http://www.traderat.com
    http://www.mjmls.com

    I personally like tradeRat.com, because it allows me to list my garage sales and sell within my neighborhood, saving me shipping $$$.

  6. We charge for job postings by bitchin_camaro · · Score: 5, Informative

    We charge employers $75 to post a job ad in San Francisco, and $25 in LA and NYC. In fact, we only started charging for NYC and LA this past week. Every day, there are hundreds of job ads just in San Francisco. It's a (very) decent chunk of change. Sean @ CL

  7. Re:$25 mil div 14 people, nice.. by bitchin_camaro · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're right, the level of spam across all the boards has been increasing. On newer cities it's much more prevalent since there are fewer people actually using the board (and in turn flagging off bad posts). We're hiring more customer service people soon, but in the meantime, shoot an email with some URLs to abuse@craigslist.org

    cheers,
    Sean @ CL

  8. Re:Why bother? by alw53 · · Score: 3, Informative


    Twenty-five million is on the low side of sales to take a company public. It probably costs $50-100K per year extra to run a public company, get big-8 audits, set up an investor services desk, file SEC crap, live in a fishbowl, pay liability insurance for the board, etc, etc. At this size one would look to VC's.