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Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist Inc.'s six-foot-seven chief executive officer, has come a long way from his days of making tofu in a commune, marching in antiwar protests clad in socks and Teva sandals and, for nine months in the early 1990s, living homeless — or as he says, "without a set address."

The former hippie from Ann Arbor, Mich., says he's even come to accept that capitalism is the best way to "organize societal resources" to provide the masses with a decent living.

But he continues to baffle people when he talks about the economics of Craigslist — the online classifieds giant and one of the top 10 Web companies in the United States, which has expanded into 50 countries.

What's confounding is that despite a universal understanding that Craigslist could be, should be, must be raking in the dough, it isn't — for the simple reason that Mr. Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark choose not to.

"We figure that we're making enough money for all of our needs," Mr. Buckmaster, 44, told the Mesh Web conference during a recent visit to Toronto.

"Running the site the way we do is a lot more fun than worrying about making more and more money."

It's not that Craigslist, incorporated in 1999, is not-for-profit. In fact, the very corporate eBay Inc. is a silent investor, holding one-quarter of the company shares, purchased from a former employee. But observers say Craigslist's estimated annual revenue of $25-million (U.S.) is only about 5 per cent of what it would be if Craigslist put a little effort into what corporate strategy types refer to as monetization.

For the vast majority of classified ads on its site, Craigslist charges nothing. Not a flat fee; not a percentage of the sale price; nothing. In just seven of its 450 markets, Craigslist charges a fee of $25 ($75 in San Francisco) for a job listing. It also charges $10 for real estate listings in New York.

The company's unwillingness to charge for most of its listings is infuriating for newspaper publishers who see classifieds moving on-line and recognize that as long as Craigslist is giving away the service for free, they will have a hard time charging for it.

Craigslist introduced the first fee in the San Francisco market in 1998. The goal was to cover the fledgling company's costs, but the side effect was that the quality of job postings improved as the quantity went down. Employers stopped flooding the site with repeated messages, and postings for get-rich-quick schemes disappeared altogether.

As Mr. Buckmaster explains it, fees were introduced in other cities because users were pushing for the higher quality of listings that they saw in San Francisco. The extra revenue was a secondary consequence.

He says Craigslist would consider introducing fees in other markets "if enough users are asking for it."

It sounds like spin, and if the speaker were anyone but Mr. Buckmaster, it would be. But becoming extremely rich is simply not on his priority list, or that of Mr. Newmark, who founded Craigslist in 1993 as an e-mail to his friends and contacts with a list of Bay area arts and technology events.

"People looked at us as real oddballs in 1999 and thereafter. We're the only company that had an easy path to an initial public offering and raising however much money we would want to ... but we never displayed any interest in that, which people found baffling," he said in an interview after his Mesh speech.

Mr. Buckmaster admits that Craigslist has lucked into a healthy business "kind of without trying." And indeed, the company's success has baffled some observers. Its user interface is considered boring by 2007 standards. Its brand name is pedestrian compared with the Googles and Yahoos of the world. And while the other Web giants all employ tens of thousands of people, Craigslist has only 24 employees, including Mr. Newmark and Mr. Buckmaster.

Mr. Buckmaster is as low-key as the company he runs. While he conveys a yogic serenity, he never cracks a smile, not even when he's telling the Toronto audience about one of his favourite classifieds — in which a woman was trying to track down a man she met on the Toronto subway system while carrying her grandmother's ashes in an urn. "I spilled my grandmother on you. We got off on the wrong foot, but I'd like to meet you for coffee," she wrote, and Mr. Buckmaster deadpans.

He acknowledges that his and Mr. Newmark's personal politics probably play a role in the unconventional way the company has developed. They are left-leaning libertarians, Mr. Newmark says, not communists as they have been labelled from time to time.

He says the company's modus operandi — to serve its users without taking more from them than necessary to operate the business — makes more sense than the traditional business model of maximizing quarterly profit by trying to squeeze every possibly penny out of one's customers.

"I think the average person, if placed in our shoes, would probably make a lot of the same decisions we have made," he says. "We've had the luxury of not having the kind of constraints that are placed on a lot of businesses, once you have external investors or are publicly traded …"

"We do what feels right to us and feels fun."

By the numbers

• 450: The number of cities worldwide for which Craigslist offers local classifieds and forums

• 8 billion: The number of page views Craigslist generates each month

• 10 million: The number of new images that are uploaded to Craigslist each month

• 25 million: The number of people who use Craigslist each month

• 20 million: The number of classified ads that Craigslist users self-publish each month

• 1 million: The number of job listings the site receives each month

• $25: The amount in U.S. dollars that Craigslist charges for jobs ads for New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, Seattle and San Diego. It charges $75 in San Francisco.

• 24: The number of Craigslist employees

Source: Craigslist