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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."
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.
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.
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.