Slashdot Mirror
Craigslist Eyed for Possible Future IPO
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."
When you're raking in that much cash, why go public and turn over control of your company to shareholders? If you just want cash, sell the whole company.
ON DELETE CASCADE
Craig's List was great because it spread by word of mouth. The community had accurate ads for good values. Also, every user I ever heard of, on either side of any transaction, was encountered almost like a "friend I hadn'y yet met". That kind of transitive trust within the community will be exploited, and destroyed, by the IPO frenzy. If there's even any left now that it's been front page news on Slashdot.
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make install -not war
The thing is, as a business owner, why would I want to dilute my investment in a business by going IPO? Wouldn't I want all the profits for myself? And, did everyone forget that the purpose of owning a business is to make money by profit, rather than making money through share trading?
IPOs are pointless if you're already a massively profitable business and if you don't need anymore investment in your business. You *MIGHT* gain some return by going public, but that's not going to be likely in todays market...
I believe the words you are looking for are: simple, clean, fast, appropriate interface.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
No seriously... what capital projects could they be planning that they would need an equity offer for? If the company is generating ~$2M/employee right now, I am willing to assume that they are making a fine profit and should be able to present a strong enough balance sheet to either get loans or simply pay for a reasonably-sized project without any debt or equtiy.
At least with google there's a scale issue as they add more features/services and attempt to attract a larger userbase. Is Craigslist moving toward doing the same?
As someone who used craigslist when it was a (gasp) email list, and also lived on the same block as the cl headquarters for 3 years in SF, this article is utter nonsense.
The whole point of craigslist is the micro-personal connection of real people, in close physical proxmity, buying & selling stuff. I've known a great many people who've purchased, sold, and gave away: airline vouchers, couches, desks, etc...
Even while living in SF during the dot com boom and bust, I know virtually nobody who ever got a job off of craigslist. Further, nobody in their right mind would use craigslist to find a home to purchase...
Oh - and back to the basics - craigslist expands thru word of mouth. How do you suppose they would charge for any of the garbage this tech-moron suggests? A great feature of cl is that you can include html in your posts - good posters often do, and include images, formatting etc... design resumes often include good css styles, images, and look pretty darn sweet - try that on hotjobs!
So, this guy thinks that without additional cost/strain/staff they're going to just quadruple his totally BS estimate of their revenue?
Why would they want to go public anyhow? With only 14 staff, and no reason to buy-out other companies or invest in serious R&D, does it ever come to mind that a businessperson with a small company making serious $$$ might just want to keep it that way?
In an IPO, you are selling your whole company, to the public (that's the "P"). Except for any part you hold back. And you can sell that later, while all the equity is price inflated by the IPO hype^Wadvertising. Sounds like a better deal than just selling the keys to the building to one private buyer.
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make install -not war
What the fuck is up with people spelling "article" as "artical"? Jesus Christ. Learn to spell simple words.
If you made $25 million last year, you wouldn't have to work for the next 10 years anyway.
This is a big contrast to the traditional purpose of an IPO: raise a lot of capital to finance some business need.
This seems like an interesting new approach.
Insightful???
Craigslist is one of the useful tools that most of the people in the Bay Area use.. Flaming it, and the citizens of SF is hardly insightful..
*took off karma bonus so i won't be modded down*
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
Yes, other sites should adopt these features:
1. Back button in forums cycles back through every post clicked on, before exiting the forum (and yet they all have the same url). Why go back? Craigslist is looking toward the future.
2. Logging in (say after pressing "reply" button on a post) completely loses context. On page 4? Go back to page 1 again. Look! A dragonfly.
3. Same forums have different urls from the homepage and the forums section, so their links don't get flagged as previously visited. And, of course, their titles are different, and in completely different order on each page, so you may never find the same forum that you were just looking at.
/. - News for the nerds of united states america. "Everybodys favourite" - sigh, there is an entire world outside who hasn't heard about craiglist.
I think the really interesting thing about this is that the web pages that are really successful in the new web (post bubble) are ones that are super stripped down and basic. Google and Craigslist two of the main sites I use. Blogs and blogging are big. Slashdot has basically the same design as ever, with the exception of the top banner ad. It seems that people didn't end up wanting lots of complexity in their web sites.
The printed word ends up (again) being the most important thing out there. It goes to show that you don't need heavy-duty graphics and don't want flashy ads if you're delivering on content.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
The author lives in a dream world: Craiglist isn't nearly as popular as eBay, google, etc. Until recently it didn't even cover my city of 2.5 million people and even now it only has a whopping 290 housing listings and 156 jobs. Sorry Craigslist, but you have a long way to go before you reach the ranks of eBay or Google, might be great if you live in San Francisco but the rest of us are left in the cold.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The key bug in your argument is the "except for any part you hold back." That amount is typically at least 70%! And selling off the remainder is difficult (sends bad signals -- lemons theory).
But in the meantime, you would get to give away 8% or so of the money raised to a fatcat banker, get to personally certify your financial statements (Sarbanes), and get to field phone calls from investors, analysts, and everyone else in the public market ecosystem.
IPOs are not the bed of roses most people assume them to be.
It's no bed of roses - that sounds more like a grave :). The IPO is the cradle; that's what the "I" stands for: "initial". Holding back is no bug - because the bigger demand of the public market increases the value of the still limited supply of shares, the amount held back can be much greater than the value of the total to a single private buyer (lower demand).
Selling off the remainder after a successful IPO is the name of the game. Insider trading has SEC rules, "golden handcuffs" agreements with other investors, and can affect the demand by signalling the market. But insider traders make lots of money selling their retained stake - and buying it back, then reselling it, when that's their best bet in the market. Sounds like work, including the other reporting requirements, but the work is very profitable, so it justifies hiring receptionists, accountants, PR people, etc. They field the phonecalls. Sarbanes and other disclosure rules are actually probably less invasive of privacy than they need to be to protect the market from racketeering. It's not winning the lottery, but played smart, an IPO is much less hassle than it is yachting.
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make install -not war