Learn About Craigslist

Craigslist, originally a San Francisco Bay Area website with listings and classifieds, now has multiple regional and country websites.

Video Transcription

Welcome to watchmojo.com. Today on the Business School feature, we take a look at another company in the technology and media space on the web. If you pick up most magazines these days, when they list the websites that we just can't live without, there is a very good chance that San Francisco based Craigslist makes it on the list. Now Craigslist is a site that was founded in 1995 by New Jersey born computer programmer Craig Newmark. Craig basically had developed this e-mail list that he would send out to friends and acquaintances telling them about the latest parties and happenings in the San Francisco Bay Area. At some point in 1995, he decided to migrate this list onto a website and dubbed it Craigslist. This site is essentially a centralized network of listings, directories and ultimately classifies with everything from housing to cars and many other things such as their pretty clever mis-connections feature on the site. Now Craigslist was initially a free service, it is pretty straight forward, if you wanted to sell something or if you were looking for something, you would simply go on this site and put up a listing. Now overtime the staff groups about 20 employees and Craig Newmark decided to start charging for some listings, the site remains largely free, but now if you are in San Francisco, New York, and other key markets and you want to put up a listing for jobs or a housing you do have to pay a small fee. That explains why today Craigslist has developed from being in nine cities in the US to over 300 cities around the world. An analyst estimate that the site generates anywhere from $10 to about 25 million in revenue every year, and fact of the matter is that if Craigslist wanted to really maximize its revenue, it would probably make anywhere from $75-200 million a year. But Craig has decided to keep the site largely free, which has essentially sucked out about $50-75 million every year from the newspaper industries and their classified business. Now Craigslist has become part of our pop culture. In 2003 there was a documentary called 24 Hours with Craigslist, in 2004 auction powerhouse eBay acquired 25% stake in the company, and in 2006 partially took blame because of Craig Newmark's libertarian views. The Chicago Lawyers Association actually sued the company for discrimination, because they allowed in some listings for people to basically say, I have an apartment to rent, but I don't want to rent it to this person and that person. Well, the site that gets some criticism for allowing such discrimination on their site, it just goes to show that Craig is a kind of guy that allows pretty much anything to go on his site, if there is a market for it. Craig Newmark remains one of the most respected and admired entrepreneurs on the web and craigslist.org is frankly a site you just couldn't live without.