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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."

4 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. What really happens when you make it "big"? by damu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Lets start with Yahoo. How do geeks and nerds see Yahoo? A wealth of information? Or just a pile ads with some search results in the middle?

    Google? Well, I have noticed as well as others have the current search results have not been as good as before.

    It seems that greed and advertising always tarnishes everything it touches. It will be interesting to see what the 14 staff memebers of CL.com decide to do with their up and coming fame.

    Good luck.

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    Useless sig.
    1. Re:What really happens when you make it "big"? by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 4, Interesting
      From the article:

      If Google can show sites like Craigslist that it's possible to be "good" and wealthy, I think you may eventually see a publicly traded Craigslist. And based on its growth rate and fanatical user base, I think it'd be a smash hit.


      Since the Google IPO is still to come, and we aren't likely to see fall out from that for years, it seems sort of funny to hold Google up as some sort of exemplar.

      Furthermore, if I wanted to run a business that was good or ethical, why would I need model my business after another company specifically for that reason? I know they now teach ethics classes at B schools, but are we so out of touch with what is ethical and good in ourselves that we need someone else's business plan to give us guidance? If you have to do a cost/benefit analysis of Ben&Jerry's to understand the benefits of good corporate behavior, you're not getting it.
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      It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
  2. Do the math and you will understand why founders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    want an ipo. Lets say Craiglist is making 25 million a year in profit and they file for an ipo. So what will the market capitalization of the company? Most likely some where between 250 million (p/e of 10) to 2.5 billion (100 p/e which is about yahoo p/e ratio) depending on how fast people will think your revenue will grow. By ipoing you can get the next 10 years of profits now. There are tons of details (ie founders have limits on how fast they can dump stock) but effectively you can get the next 10 years of profits now and the best part is you don't have to work for the next 10 years.

    Personally I think they will have problems charging for a lot of thier services. The reason people use CL personals is because they are free not because it is a great service. Same thing for a lot of other categories where people are trying to get rid of junk

    BTW It is the VC which prcess really founder equity more thab ip process.

  3. Another non-discussion about non-news by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why is it news when a stupid columnist points out the obvious? Yeah yeah, the craigslist people could make a lot of money if they chose to exploit their site as much as they could. But they've shown no interest in doing so. If that every changes, then we'll have a news item.