Slashdot Mirror
How Craigslist is Keeping up Internet Ideals
prostoalex writes "CBS MarketWatch discusses whether Craig Newmark and CraigsList.org are missing out by not 'monetizing' their traffic or selling out to large corporations. CraigsList is currently #7 e-commerce site on the Internet with 13M unique visitors monthly, and only charges for real estate listings by professional brokers. No word on whether that income is enough to pay 24 salaries and data center fees for hosting a major Internet site." From the article: "Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name. Despite the many unfortunate examples of greed, Internet entrepreneurs aren't all about getting rich quick and cashing out. At an entrepreneur's roots is a vision to provide a service that helps alleviate a pain point. The money thing always muddied the waters down the road. The attitude at Craigslist is a nice reminder of how entrepreneurs' ideals can still remain intact, no matter how odd they may seem in a world that worships money."
> "whether Craig Newmark and CraigsList.org are missing out"
Of course they're missing out on making tons of money.
However, whether they're missing out in a sense which matters to them personally, presumably not, since they've obviously chosen to do what they wish to do; so MarketWatch is basically contemplating its own navel.
> No word on whether that income is enough to pay 24 salaries and data center fees for
> hosting a major Internet site.
Apparently it must be, or they wouldn't still have jobs and the sites would have closed down.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Some people paid attention during the dot.com bubble, learned a few things and are happy to just do what they want to do.... I dig that attitude.
Real estate is not the only paid category. Jobs postings in the largest markets are also revenue producers. (Although at $25 it can't be beat)
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Um, eBay owns 25% of them.
If they charged, what would separate them from every other site out there that does the same thing? They have more of a place on the internet by doing what they are doing right now. If they charged, their niche would go away.
Craiglist is a wonderful site which is put to use and also sometimes misused by the people using its services. But one is bound to believe that the good it provides far outweighs the bad things. I know atleast one guy who emigrated to USA who has used craiglist to find better accomodation. Having read the story, I feel that the two owners running craiglist are true philanthropists.
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Not that I have a problem with either, but the majority of the traffic has to be to the escorts, swinging, and deciant listings.
I work for a company out of san francisco, and our employees have some quite funny Craigslist stories.
Check out "ouchie(ouchy) the clown. Your very own ball gag, sm, party clown.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
When I want to sell something I usually choose Craig's List over eBay. It is free, local (no need to ship), and the entire process is usually quicker.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Go Team!
I also find your handle delightfully appropriate.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
These guys are "greedy capitalists." They charge for some things. I'm sure they pay their bills and provide homes and nice things for their families. They are just choosing an approach that maximizes the long-term prospects for their company. Many choose to go for short-term gains and suffer in the long run, but both approaches involve something being sold, something being bought, and some sort of filthy currency.
I see these sort of ideas come out of the San Francisco circle jerk of media many times. Capitalism is bad except for OUR capitalists, which are good. In the long run, this approach may make these guys even more greedy over the years compared to all the prospectors who try the hit-and-run approach, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, all this economic navel gazing is only possible in rich capitalist countries where we have more time for self-righteousness because we don't have to spend so much time just getting enough food to live.
Attributing "money is evil" attitudes to the good people at Craiglist is unjustified. They are probably still expanding their classified ad network, with the aim of reaching a certain level of market penetration before monetizing it further. Or, before accepting buy-out offers that are based on the ever-growing potential that the site has for monetization.
About a year ago I was working at a big European bookmaker and our MySQL setup had gone as far as we could push it. We wanted to hear from another big MySQL user so our CTO mailed Craigslist, and to our pleasant surprise we soon got a very long, friendly and helpful explanation about their setup. I don't need to say how rare that is in business. Very likable company indeed.
Are they really? I think they realise that charging for more types of ads, or some other money-making tactic, makes their service less attractive, and makes it that much easier for someone else to come from nowhere and overtake them.
It's not too obvious what they'd do, either - perhaps their own Google-style "sponsored" ads (maybe letting you pay to get your ad show more prominently). But that might well annoy their customers more than Google's discreet ads do.
Maybe they're just biding their time because they don't know what to do next. But in any event, if they have enough business sense to become the most popular site in their market, I don't think they're acting entirely out of altruism.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
One only has to surf through the Rants and Raves as well as the Casual Encounter section of Craigslist to be amused for hours.
no matter how odd they may seem in a world that worships money
Well obviously if there are people like Craig Newmark, then the whole world doesn't worship money. I don't like this blanket statement because it assumes an extreme view while the very article it's attached to shows the opposite. In fact, statements like that are one of the main reasons so many people dislike and distrust mainstream media.
Thanks, Craig, for proving the world doesn't "worship money." I've met too many web site owners that did sell out. I'm on your side.
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It's interesting to think about the economic implications of Craigslist - certainly, not slapping ads everywhere and charging for all sorts of posts has allowed the site to grow to its huge size, but on the other hand, it has all but killed newspapers' cash cow, the classifieds. You can say, "who cares, newspapers are dying anyway," but the resources newspapers have - trained journalists, editors, the whole damn infrastructure - is quite valuable to our society as a whole. I don't really think Craigslist is going to kill the whole industry, but it's certainly had a big effect on how newspapers will move into the 21st century.
That being said, this decision on Craigslist's part to not monetize the site fully is something like "accelerated capitalism". In other words, they're skipping that whole phase where they maximize their size and influence to make lots of money until a competitor comes in to undercut them - because you pretty much CAN'T undercut them, they're undercutting themselves to achieve scale. Sites like Youtube are doing this too - the technology of everything has grown faster than the market can respond.
While people often make attempts to prevert the internet into what they want it to be, a place to advertise, a place to argue, to publish information about yourself that no one wants to read, it continues to resist shoves in any particular direction. When something new is added the old stuff is not displaced. YouTube can make thousands of videos available and everyone can get really excited about the coming Web 2.0 apocalypse, but all the old stuff is still right where it was and just as useful.
If Craigslist wants to give stuff away, they can. If someone wants to charge for the exact same service, they can. If a guy can convince a VC to give him a couple of hundred million dollars to build a web site that tries to ship 50 lb bags of dog food across the country, and he has a time machine to take him back to the early 90s, he can.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Is it just me, or is it annoying that neither the original news article nor the slashdot summary have a link to Craigs List, the website under discussion?
Granted this one is an easy one to find, but in general, why are News sites so stingy with links to what they are reporting on.
Not providing pictures of some marvelous device they are reporting on is also a major gripe
BTW
Craig's List
Letter To Iran
Personally, I just see Craiglist as a web emulation of Usenet, with a few enhancements like the ability to easily include pictures, edit your posts (cancels haven't worked on Usenet in a long time,) flag offensive posts, a web interface (which makes it easier to use for the non-technically inclined) and management that's all together in one place so things can be changed (for good or bad) a lot quicker and easier than they can on Usenet.
They did a pretty good job with it, and did a really good job with only trying to charge the people who were really willing to pay -- which brought in enough money to pay for things (I assume) but not to alienate their users. If craiglist were to try and require that everybody have accounts and charge for them, most of their users would just leave, and somebody else would probably re-implement craiglist somewhere else.
In any event, Craiglist gives up a lot of the features of Usenet, but for the most part these are features that the users have decided that they don't need -- or at least they seem to have decided that with their feet, because they're using Craiglist rather than Usenet. (Perhaps they're not even aware of Usenet, or their ISP doesn't offer a news server because it thinks if it does, it has to offer alt.binaries.* But that's another matter entirely ...)
Look, anytime they want, they can cash in for billions. It's not a flash-in-the-pan, so there's no hurry to do that.
Yet once you have billions, your whole life changes. You have to consult security experts about where you - and your relatives - can travel without fear of kidnapping. Even your oldest, closest friends start hitting you up for investments.
So Craig and crew have the best of both worlds: normal lives for now, with plenty of social standing, in a nice city - and billions available for their retirement.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
And apparently lots of people like it too. It is a throwback to the internet that used-to-be.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
they have enough business sense to become the most popular site in their market
It takes no particular talent to sell a dollar for 50 cents.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
You know, I've worked for a small start-up kind of business that was "missing out" on "tons of money". Basically, the owners could have sold it to a much larger company, which then would have run the company into the ground. Or, they could have adopted the same practices that their competitors were using, and made a lot more money over the short term.
However, what kept the company working the way it did, what kept their customers happy, had always been the practices that cost them a bit more or didn't make as much money in the short term. What made it a good company was that it was a small company, without a lot of red tape or bureaucracy. The practices that made the owners, employees, and customers like the company were exactly the practices that a large company or a company driven by short-term profits would not do. In short, they could have sold out at any time, and become not better than their competition for the sake of short-term gains, but chose not to because they wanted to do a good job.
I wish more companies worked like that.
Okay, would in a world where money is widely worshipped meet your needs?
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I know slashdot's readership has a decidedly socalist leaning about many things, but what is wrong with people deciding to profit from what they have created? Why is foregoing said profit considered "noble"?
Of course they're missing out on making tons of money.
They make millions of dollars a year. Even while EBay hinders them in Europe to promote their own offering (EBay owns 30% of craigslist). I work with Craig's biggest competitor outside the US, who has been approached by EBay. So we have some idea how much Craig can sell out for. But why should he? His growth is still spectacular and he's bringing in millions. If you don't think a multi-million dollar private business with only 24 employees is considered "making tons of money" then you're crazy.
Developers: We can use your help.
So the executives at marketwatch.com got together, "How can we exploit this popular, and free online resource?" "We can write a story about them and fill our website with various means of advertising." "Great, get to it, make sure it hits slashdot for that extra revenue" "done".
It takes no particular talent to sell a dollar for 50 cents.
If what they've done is so easy, why doesn't someone else just create a different but similarly-oriented site, monetize it, and laugh all the way to the bank?
They're providing a service that people want, and are apparently making ends meet while they do it. That's hardly "selling a dollar for 50 cents." Many sites can't even manage to do that.
What MarketWatch is arguing, is that perhaps they could make even more money than they're doing. Perhaps they could. But perhaps they'd also drive away some of their audience and leave themselves open to the 'next' Craigslist.
Just because they're not making risky business decisions doesn't make them fools; I thought anyone who'd survived the dot-com burst would realize that maybe a conservative stance is underrated when it comes to building a brand and business.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
that the creators are smart enough to realize that there is no patent on online classifieds (and classifieds are simple enough that even the most braindead patent reviewer wouldn't ok one, and even if he did every newspaper in the world would fight to shut it down), and also there's a really small barrier to entry for online classifieds (just do text only and let people host their own images). So if craigslist does go down the path of the darkside, it'd take approx. nothing to get a free competitor up and running....
:)
But I'm feeling really cynical today
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Forbes occasionally whines about Craigslist. The real effect of Craigslist is not on the Internet. It's killing newspaper classified advertising, which used to be highly profitable.
Whenever articles about these guys come out, it's made to seem that they have passed on the chance to make billions in favor of living some poor monkish existence. This always upsets me. These guys have certainly made enough money to last the rest of their lives, barring any sort of Tysonesque platinum-plated Snow Leopard purchases. The old boys on Wall Street, and journalists the same, seem unable to grasp the concept that, despite the cliche about how the money one has is never enough, there might actually be people who would rather be quite wealthy and loved then stupendously wealthy and loathed.
Even while EBay hinders them in Europe to promote their own offering (EBay owns 30% of craigslist).
I'm confused. eBay doesn't own a controlling interest in Craigslist; they're only 25 or 30% at most, purchased from a departing executive. That doesn't give them much of a say in operations. How is Craigslist being hindered? They seem to be active in quite a few European cities.
I'd imagine that it might be tough to gain traction in a foreign market, since the only way I've ever heard of CL 'advertising' was by word-of-mouth. That seems like it would be a much bigger hindrance than the wishes of a minority stakeholder. Or am I missing something in the equation?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A share in a company is an asset that you can (generally) sell or assign at will. The corporation (outside of specific cases of restricted stock issues) has no way of participating or not in the deal.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
"I dig that attitude."
Partner, in these parts, we Mod Parents Up.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Obviously the question arrises as to whether that's just the natural course of evolution and it's time for the dinosoaurs for find a new bussiness model. That's too glib a response for two reasons. First, it's a matter of huge consequence to the nation and to democracy in general to have a plethora of news sources that get their profits from the masses directly so they are not beholden to a few key advertisers. Second, craig's list is a temprary anamoly. It might be said to be a loss leader for whatever is going to replace it. But someday it's going to die or get forced out of bussiness. For example, as has been widely predicted when net neutrality goes away people running big sites are going to have to start paying the ISPs for access to their customers. Or maybe Craig's list will go public or it's owners finally decide to cash in on the latent ten billion dollar value they have.
In any case we won't have free classified ads forever. But in the mean time we might loose all the newspapers.
I'm not happy with that trade. Free does not always mean the results are good. It's like someone was giving you free internet explorers for a while and you nearly lost netscape.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They are a success b/c they provide a unique service mix and they know their customers. The same argument can be said for Yahoo, Google and "fill in your favorite publicly traded .com" here.
Well, anyone can. but that reason only seems spur growth of blogs on the other hand.
you will find that a spam, junk or get rich quick scheme gets flagged quickly and removed.
The flagging feature is one of the best parts of Craigslist IMHO.
From the summary: and only charges for real estate listings by professional brokers...
That's incorrect. craigslist charges for real estate postings in the New York City area only. Additionally, they charge below-market rates for job postings in 3 markets (SF, LA and NY I believe).
They are a profitable business. They have, however, chosen to throttle how much profit they suck from the thing.
Beware of the Leopard.
is it to much to ask to get a clickable url of the site the article is about??????
xb0x
Good riddance to the majority of corporate newspapers still in circulation. The news they typically present rarely strays from Wall Street and bush@1600pennsylvaniaavenue.gov press releases. So let them die a slow painful death. When newspapers realize people need good, unbiased NEWS instead of corporate and rightist propaganda and begin delivering, people will buy newspapers again (or subscribe to online content).
From the article:
"Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name. Despite the many unfortunate examples of greed, Internet entrepreneurs aren't all about getting rich quick and cashing out.
Slashdot, on the other hand, sold out to OSDN, and has never been the same since. They could've done worse than OSDN as corporate overlords, but still, there are a lot of ex-dotters out there who miss the early days.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I just finished re-reading "The Door Into Summer" by Robert Heinlein and i'm reminded of the part where the main character's business partners are trying to force him out of so they can sell the company to a big corporation. He says something along the lines of "You can't use more than one swimming pool or more than one yacht at a time, and you'll have both in another year with the way we're doing business now so why should we sell out to another company and put them in charge?" But his partners are intent on having more money and power than they can actually use, just for the sake of money and power.
It seems like all the old desires to build empires out of countries has changed with the times and been applied to the business world. I wonder if society as a whole will ever look back at the present and think "why did they ever waste so much time and happiness in pursuit of something like that?"
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's funny that MarketWatch runs an article saying, "Hey, get a load of this: These guys actually don't worship money!" Like that's such a far-fetched concept for the reader. And I suppose it is, for a MarketWatch reader.
Basically, they're praising these Craigslist guys, mildly, for having principles that seem to go beyond money. But that's backwards to me. Perhaps the Craigslist guys just haven't forgotten the obvious: money does not equal wealth. So, they do what they feel like doing in life. It's really the MarketWatch people who operate according to a set of principles: for one, the flawed principle that money = wealth. Seriously, when you're obsessed with cash, you've really just made things more complicated than they are.
Anyway, the best line in the article is the statement: "Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name." And why is it good for entrepreneurs from San Francisco to have a great name? Why, so they can make more money, of course! Yes!!
Money is important. You need it to buy food, shelter, medicine, providence for your family (if you have one) and so on.
The economy moves rapidly. It is not always obvious where your money will be coming from ten years down the road (when your skill set has been made obsolete or your industry has been outsourced or what-have-you). Having a fat pile of money ensures that your needs will still be met.
So I don't know that it is fair to say that our society "worships" money. The fact is we need it, so we put a lot of effort into getting it. That's just the way it is.
So, while the business of making a lot of money quickly may seem greedy, we must admit that there are very compelling economic (and even personal) motivations for attempting to do this. The sooner you have a large nestegg, the sooner you can rest easy in the face of an unpredictable future.
Resisting this urge, and instead accepting a slower income (and along with it the risk of running out of money in the future), for the benefit of others, is noble. Does that make a failure to do this evil? Are there two polar extremes with no middle ground?
IMO, providing for your needs, now and in the future, is not greed so much as self-interest. This is the primary motivator behind a capatilist society, which is the one in which we live. I won't deny the nobility of self-sacrifice, nor will I deny that there is a point at which accumulation stops being self-interest and transforms into greed. However, I will also deny that self-interest is the same as "worshipping money" or that trying to make money quickly is greedy or evil.
I have, amongst others, the following motivations:
1. Doing work to an excellent standard and with a great deal of quality
2. Making other people happy
3. Making money proportional with my efforts, the quality of my work and its usefulness to the people I provide it for, ideally a substantial amount.
This must mean I am a schizophreniac, obviously I would otherwise not be able to maintain three motivations all at once. Two of my personalities are nuns; they both subscribe to motivation 2. Then there is the company director from southern Texas, subject of motivation 3, and the fourth is a tailor from Saville Row, doing number 1.
Doctor?
They realized that filthy rich was ok and that they didn't need to go for filthy, filthy, filthy stinking rich?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I understand in a detached sense why folks at places like MarketWatch would ask such questions like "it's SO obvious that Company A could make so much more profit by doing these simple things" and never seem to get that there really are companies out there whose goals do not consist entirely of 1. PROFIT. The service, the product, the atmosphere are the important things here, and in the end, what exactly would they do with all the extra profit? It seems somewhat likely that Craig decided that he was just fine with the money that he was making and what he was paying for and he didn't need to be constantly searching out new sources of revenue. For some people, there really is such a thing as 'enough'.
It's kind of an interesting example of a theoretical economic model happening in reality.
One of the models is a natural monopoly with no monopoly pricing power. This normally doesn't happen in reality, but Craigslist MIGHT be the perfect example of it.
It assumes that because of economies of scale (where the point of diminishing returns from increasing marginal costs exists on the curve outside of full market... essentially, fixed costs get spread out, but we assume that marginal costs decrease for a point, then increase... this historically happened because you first farm the best land, or get the easiest raw materials, but in technology terms, building a site for 100 users is easy, 1000 not to bad, 10000 a bit harder, etc., as you grow beyond a "single shared server with MySQL" to a dedicated machine, to a server farm, the complexity ends up making the cost/user increase at a certain point... when your theoretical website goes beyond what a mainframe can power, the costs of growing become higher). So we know that the natural market will yield a single provider, because their costs will ALWAYS be lower than if there are two players.
However, in this scenario, the market is still competitive if barriers to entry are 0. If the monopoly player collects a monopoly rent by increasing their price, a competitor would enter and undercut them. In that case, we see a market where there is a single monopoly player, but pricing that is the same as the free market would provide.
Take Microsoft in the DOS 2.x - 3.x days. Microsoft was the only provider of operating systems for IBM-compatible computers, but their prices were very low... what you would expect in a free market situation. Once they attempted to collect monopoly rents, you saw the emergence of DR DOS undercutting them. In fact, Microsoft bundled Windows 4.0 with DOS 7.0 BECAUSE the emergence of competition in the DOS space was forcing their prices to stay low enough that they weren't able to collect monopoly rents on the DOS side. It was only in Windows-space, where the complexity was sufficient to prevent a competitor from introducing an identical product, that Microsoft was able to extract monopoly rents and grow into a large, profitable company. There was no technical reason to not ship a Windows 4.0 that ran on top of DOS (purchased separately), in fact, you could boot in DOS mode, then run WIN.EXE (or WIN.COM, I forget, I just typed WIN) which would launch Windows. There was no reason that you couldn't use DR DOS with Windows, other than Microsoft bundled them to push competition out. By making MS DOS "free" by including it with Windows, they eliminated competition in the DOS space, and therefore there was no reason to buy DR DOS instead of Windows 95 with free MS DOS, which is how Microsoft FINALLY got people to migrate from DOS to Windows, which let them create a migration path to NT.
If Craigslist were to start charging monopoly pricing, a new, free competitor would enter immediately. This is part of why even for the listings that they charge for, they only charge a small, nominal fee. If prices were to reach a sufficient level, a new, Joe's List, would take over their market.
Craigslist is ok, but I get frustrated by the way its divided into subsites by city. I know its hip to live in a major city and Craigslist probably tries to encourage that for utopian reasons, but what about people like me? I live in Laurel, MD - roughly halfway between Baltimore and Washington, DC. If I want to look for a job, house or bizarre relationship on Craigslist, I have to browse multiple sites. Why not put all the listings into one big database and let people search by radius from where they live? They could still have the city portals for Baltimore, etc, but searching by radius would make the site much more usable.
Or maybe this feature is already there and I've missed it...in that case, please educate me.
I don't see how they can equate asking for payment for a service with greed.
Surely greed is demanding everything for nothing as if website owners owe you something.
It's nice that craigslist offers so many serives for free, but personally, I wouldn't think any less of him or his website if they were to charge or place ads on the site. He has bills to pay and mouths to feed just like the rest of us.
God Be Gone
I think it's worth mentioning as well that Craig et. al. make mountains of money. Just not as much as they could if they exploited their product to the hilt. Part of why they got where they are is by not doing those things.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
"13M unique visitors each month"
I think that you mean "distinct" visitors here,
meaning that some of them came more than once
but all their visits counted as one.
A "unique" visitor would either mean that there
was just one visitor, or that each of those visitors
was the only person like him or her. The first is
not the case, and the second is always true until
we start cloning humans or something.
Mathematically, if x and y are distinct, then
they are not equal. If x is unique, it is distinct
from all other objects. Generally, one says that
x is unique after defining a set of objects that have
some properties and then showing that the set contains
exactly one member, namely x.
Whenever you see the adjective "unique" applied to
a set of objects, it's probably being misused.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Yes, they haven't sold out. But they're not making much money, either. Craiglist is not helping their users any by refusing to "sell out" even a little bit. Have you used Craigslist? It is a very basic site and it is often difficult to find the information you want. And, while Joel Spolsky feels that innovative web apps should be impossible to use, the rest of us realize the value in spending a few $$$ to increase usability for thousands and thousands of users.
Usually when something is an the extreme of a spectrum, it's not right.
It's not that MarketWatch is contemplating their own navel: it's that they're speaking to their audience. Their audience is heavily invested in a set of business practices in which short-term profit is the definition of success. Any business practice that operates outside that definition cannot, in their minds, be a success, of course, so they question it. The underlying idea -- which they share with any evangelical group -- is that you must try to convince people that what you're doing is the only good way, and other ways must somehow be wrong, for fear they will encroach on your territory.
MarketWatch writes to reassure its readers that they've made the right choices, knowing that reassured readers will come back for more.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
When done properly, business should treat money as a commodity, not an end. If making money is the sole aim of a business, it ends up sucking to go to work. If on the other hand you *want* to do it, and make money in reasonable quantities, long term happiness and customer satisfaction are easily achieved.
There's nothing like asking for help regarding a business from someone who actually wants, really wants, to solve your problem, and isn't just there for the paycheck.
From the beginning (see Sun, Yahoo!, etc) the internet has been about building a business and flipping it for as much as you can get. The only non-commercial ideals are found in the education or government space, which of course should be non-commercial.
Craigslist is great, but it isn't "good" that they don't monitize, it's just what they are doing.
Seems lots of people don't know the difference between "Serving and Worshipping Money" and having Money serve them.
Maybe many of the 24 or so craiglist bunch know the difference.
There are people who end up super rich because what they like is making yet more money.
But there are also people who end up super rich just by doing what they like even if it's not about making more money.
If you like to make people happy and they give you lots of money in return, and most other people don't mind and won't mind, except Fanatic Worshippers and High Priests of the Money God, it's hard to see what you are doing wrong.
People say WoW addicts have no life, how about those who worship and serve Money?
They realized that filthy rich was ok and that they didn't need to go for filthy, filthy, filthy stinking rich?
I've never understood this attitude of self-righteous self-limiting. What is there to admire in someone who chooses not to fly as high as he can? I look at it the other way around; someone who is in a great position but throws it away out of fear that some envious little pricks will attack him for being "filthy filthy filthy stinking rich", is a coward.
That being said, I think it's altruistic presumption to suppose that Craig Newmark is thinking along those lines anyhow. There are other ways to be compensated besides money; unless you know him personally, there's no telling what non-monetary value Newmark is really "paid" in.
...Craigslist is 'Keeping up' is the use of Times New Roman on the Internet.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I read a few weeks ago Craiglists has a revenue of $10million per year with a company of 25 people. I'm sure Craig Newman and his employes are happy or else they wouldn't be doing it. Invetors and banks aren't happy because they can't get a slice of the pie and can't create something themselves to do it.
It's rather well known that Craigslists' revenue is between $20M & $40M per year. They don't need to work on monetizing traffic, and Craig has stated he doesn't because he's a paranoid delusional who thinks that if they turn into a $100m/year company that he will need body guards. Beyond that, what's the big deal about craigslist? They won't write an API and let people search the data with tools that aren't as 1998 as craigslist is. Have you ever tried searching for an apartment, car, or house on craigslist? I end up dumping my search results into a craigslist parser I wrote because their search is so pathetic.
I appreciate that Craigslist is popular and a success in the US.
However, in Europe things are a little different. In most EU countries there isn't the volume of genuine users to make the flagging system work. Thus it's an ever decreasing spiral downward -> the site's full of spam, con artists, grey and black hats -> genuine advertisers don't post because of it -> no-one visits the site.
Take for example Craigslist Denmark as typical. there's about 1,000 posts on the site. Less than 10% are genuine. Which in some ways is nice, because the spammers are spamming scammers and vice versa. If anyone from Craigslist is reading this, please take some time to be utterly ashamed at the state of most of your EU pages. You have failed.
If you are looking for something illegal, Craigslist Europe IS the place to look - there's all sorts of stuff you can get listed there. Passports, fake degrees, protected species, illegal porn, drugs - prescription or otherwise, or alternatively you can get nicely screwed over by some Nigerians, a loan scam, a work from home scam, webcam and dating scams, etc etc etc etc.
What you pretty much can't do is use Craigslist as it was intended.
It's a gift to tabloid journalists and lawyers, and it's astounding that it hasn't got seriously bad press yet.
Well, I was making a joke, so I hope you aren't calling me an envious little prick and a coward. I don't use craiglist, but I get the impression that it is pretty great and a lot of people get a lot out of using it, that Craig apparently doesn't care how much actual money he gets out of it makes no difference to me. It is pretty cool that he is driven to make it the best craiglist it can be though, as far as I can tell that's what motivates him.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There are actually patents for online classified ads, the most recent I found was issued June 06, 2006.
:)
Patent 7062466.
Everyone love's the Internet
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I guess my point is: if your company was not 'making tons of money' for altruistic reasons, then I suspect it failed---and if not, they deserved to fail: altruism is the sacrifice of earned, honourable wealth in favour of unearned favours. If they were not 'making tons of money' because they had a good long-term strategy, then fantastic; and I hope they're raking it in today.
my two pence.
I assume a "deviant" is somebody who likes doing things that you don't like doing?
I suspect you of being a puritan. A puritan, to me, is a person who is terrified by the thought that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.
Hookers are valuable members of society because they increase the amount of pleasure in the world. We need more of them. And we need to stop harassing them with laws made by puritans.
The company still exists and is doing quite well, specifically because they're considered the high-quality company in their field. You shouldn't misunderstand so much-- they are making tons of money, but they're also "missing out" on "tons of money". In other words, they're making a tidy profit, but they could be considered to be missing opportunities for a lot more money. The reasoning isn't altruistic. The owners like their company, and want to keep running it. They want to continue to grow and be a sustainable business, and they want the company to remain the sort of company that they'd want to own and run.
I don't want to get into a petty argument with you, but certainly the world would be better off if companies were run by people like this. No, making money is not a sin, but it doesn't follow then that making money cannot be done sinfully. It is possible to make a move that will temporarily make a profit, but over the long term cause irreparable damage to you, your company, your industry, and even society in general. Short-sighted greed can cause a company to run itself out of business. Indeed, wanting to build and sustain your company over the long-term is not a sin either.
In short, you (and others) seem to think I was attacking capitalism, which isn't the case. Capitalism assumes that greed and pride are an inevitable part human nature, and so it's a system that tries to turn those motivations toward the benefit of society by rewarding those who provide a good or service that others need. I think that this is all correct. However, this does not mean that, from a societal standpoint, greed ought to be viewed as an end in itself. Greed isn't necessarily admirable, nor is it infallible. The proper end is the benefit of the society, and where personal greed does terrible harm to society, we, as a society, ought not applaud it.
Sorry, but more money in the hands of good people is a good thing. Think about Buffet and Gates. Those guys are putting together a charity which may have the ability to literally wipe contagious disease from the face of the planet*. If they had followed the business philosophy of Craig, well, there would be a whole lot more dead kids out there.
It's like my friend in dental school. She says she doesn't want to make a lot of money, she wants to help people. So when she graduates, she's going to spend a year in south America building houses for poor people. I told her that if she really wanted to help, she would work in the US and use half her salary to hire a dozen workers in her place to work in her place and build many more houses than she could ever build.
*imagine vaccinating everyone on the planet for all diseases which require human hosts at the same time. Craig would be a better man if he capitalized and chipped in to that fund.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I guess I was too subtle, but I was merely pointing out that Craig gets to do what he wants more than other people because he is quite wealthy at this point, what he learned from the bubble isn't real important; that he is wildly successful is certainly nice, but his bank account isn't something he needs to worry about. Jimmy Wales is another good example; he spends his time doing interesting things, but you had better believe that he isn't going to give up his ability to support himself to pay Wikipedia's bandwidth bill.
And I don't think anybody is going to deny that more money in the hands of good people is a good thing, but that does not in fact imply that less money in the hands of good people is a bad thing. Shortly, less good is not bad. If you honestly believed it was, you would be out building a house, not posting to slashdot.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well, I don't profess to be more than marginally altruistic. I merely want to point out that refusing great profit is not the act of a great man, but merely the act of a nice guy.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Or even merely an indication that someone doesn't care. Apathy doesn't make somebody nice(I'm not arguing Craig is apathetic...).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As an example giving food to Somalia helps them eat, but it also drives local farmers out of business ensuring aid dependency will continue. In my opinion the guy who won a Nobel peace prize recently because realized that these people can start real businesses on micro loans smaller than $5 is the real hero. Instead of oppressing the poor with welfare he empowered them.
In the American Indian tribes that get the most welfare from the government tend to be the poorest and have the highest unemployment rates. Some Indian tribes have unemployment rates upwards of 40% compared to the national average of 4% despite having free collage, hiring preferences, and access to nearly all government research grants.
Welfare is no simple fix to end poverty like many liberals believe.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
.... I dig that attitude.I think you meant digg.
craiglist is one of the first major websites that not only implements but also enforces SPF.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Who said anything about welfare? You just wanted to gripe or something? I think everyone has heard the parable you're going after;
"Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and you keep him warm for the rest of his life."
I think Gates is focusing on disease, not on corn-dumping. Your point about donating for economic development being more important than donating for long-term food aid is understood most well-informed people. But we are talking about vaccinating people for disease which are ONLY developed by the most advanced economies. Vaccination is not going to slow the development of a not-even-agrarian economy! If you think so you're cracked--nothing but a ranting partisan extremist.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The point about food actually does apply to vaccinations and medical treatment as well. There are many companies in the mix struggling in attempt to make generic and affordable treatments for people. When someone intervenes by buying treatments from a rich American pharmaceutical company like Pfizer and distributing them, the net result is that people get temporary treatment, and Pfizer becomes more dominant as their secrets are guarded by patents and teams of lawyers.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Bwahahahaha, Bill and Buffet are agents of the Illuminati. The vaccines probably have a dangerous chemical or bacterial trojan that may be triggered in a decade or so.
Why waste billions in vaccines? They could be used that money to instead fund businesses in these poor countries and generally uplift the lifestyle of the entire population.
*imagine vaccinating everyone on the planet for all diseases which require human hosts at the same time.
Imagine me putting a pickaxe through your skull and then using said pickaxe to drag you though a pit of sulphuric acid and you will come close to what it was like imagining your proposal above.
- Nothing to see hear.
And how many people must die before the cheap alternatives is available for the underdeveloped countries?
So starving people in africa and asia are just falling all over themselves to get access to the HPV vaccine... if only it were a little cheaper?
No, I don't see that happening. Most of these people won't get vaccinated unless its free. The type of vaccination required to eliminate a disease entirely will never happen without some serious welfare.
Also, it is important that drug company patents are honored--they fund research into getting new types of drugs! That means 1st world prices for the 3rd world in many cases.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Huh? It's already happened on single-nation basis. We just need to expand the number of nations. You're weird.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Aside from that, I don't agree with your post, you are just chanting to the gods of capitalism. It is just not that easy, although it's better to send vaccines than to send food. But it would be better to get rid of the MS tax, so the governments in third world countries could have a little more money to spend on social programs instead of licenses. So I don't think Bill Gates has a good net effect on third world countries, vaccines or not vaccines.
Vaccination causes brain damage in 1 in 300,000 children in the UK. It also causes secondary diseases ( approx 30% of those vaccinated for measels developed a much more severe strain in later life), has caused cancer in ~20% of those who were polio vaccinated (from contaminated source material i.e. monkeys). It has also produced adverse reactions and secondary disease in large numbers of service personel who were vaccinated for Gulf War I.
Your proposal would lead to at least 20,000 brain damaged, and a massive increase in secondary disease. On the upside, drug company profitability would increase by many billions of dollars, so those of us who are capable of looking after our own immune system can buy drug company stock and retire.
- Nothing to see hear.
Which vaccination caused brain damage? What was mechanism?
Has the failure in the 1950s production of polio vaccine been corrected since then? And since everyone in the US was vaccinated for polio, and that caused 20% of the population of the US to develop cancer, why hasn't anyone told the trial lawyers about it?
Are your claims of vaccination side-effect related to the vaccines themselves, or just to flawed manufacturing processes? Are those processes still in use?
Forgive me if I am skeptical of your (not-at-all-cited) claims.
Oh, and you know what else causes cancer? Longevity.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Last time I looked entrepreneurship was about bringing an idea to life and making it a paying proposition. There is no requirement in the term to not get rich nor is making money "selling out" or one whit less idealistic. It is about making dreams become reality. Presumably the folks at Craig's List have a good reason for their business model and practices that allows them to get out of their work what they value. But they are not automatically any more (or any less for that matter) virtuous if they make less money from their efforts for the amount value create than others.
Which vaccination caused brain damage?
Triple antigen.
What was mechanism?
First noted by Professor Gordon Stewart, the most likely cause considered to be the pertussis component of the triple antigen vaccine. Dr PM Jeavons (The Lancet 25/10/1975) suggested seperating out the pertussis component of the triple antigen to reduce the risk of brain damage.
Has the failure in the 1950s production of polio vaccine been corrected since then?
The Polio vaccine is no longer administered (at least in the country I live, not sure about the US/UK), so it is unlikely that it is still produced in any quantity.
And since everyone in the US was vaccinated for polio, and that caused 20% of the population of the US to develop cancer, why hasn't anyone told the trial lawyers about it?
Not everyone in the US was vaccinated for Polio, it varied from state to state. The contamination was a single batch believed to be manufactured in Europe, and put an estimated millions at risk.
Are your claims of vaccination side-effect related to the vaccines themselves, or just to flawed manufacturing processes?
The vaccines themselves. And they are not claims. They are well documented side effects in medical journals. I would add citations, but every time I've tried in the past my post seems to be blocked by the lameness filter.
- Nothing to see hear.