Craig Newmark, the nervous, dishevelled, 53-year-old founder of Craigslist.org, is an Internet libertarian.
He muses about building an army of citizen journalists who will monitor the world's media for accuracy; he sings the praises of Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia that is maintained by users, and he revels in the culture of Craigslist.org, a popular Internet bulletin board where people connect for business or pleasure without a corporate or government intermediary.
Eleven years after founding Craigslist in San Francisco, Mr. Newmark controls a global enterprise that operates in 90 cities in 35 countries, generating three billion page views from 10 million users every month.
But in keeping with his anti-corporate philosophy, Mr. Newmark says he has no intention of building a revenue-generating juggernaut by accepting display advertising, or of following the path blazed by Google Inc. and eBay Inc. to stock market riches.
Nor does Mr. Newmark profess to be concerned about reports that Google and Microsoft Corp. and News Corp.'s MySpace.com are all planning to launch new services that would compete with Craigslist.
“We don't view other sites doing similar things as competition,” he told foreign journalists at a press conference in New York yesterday.
“We figure there are a lot of human needs out there that need to be addressed. We run as a community service, kind of a public trust, and as long as corporations are genuinely helping people, that's a pretty good thing.”
He warned, however, that would-be corporate competitors will find it hard to match Craigslist.org's appeal because, for the most part, its service is free and its users have a feeling of community.
“People expect other people on the site to be trustworthy,” he said. “We're all aware that there are the occasional bad guys, but somehow this whole thing works and works pretty well.”
Craigslist has grown from a quirky bulletin board for hip urbanites to a mainstay in many cities. Younger people in particular turn to it to find apartments, land jobs, arrange services, buy furniture or find dates, occasionally with the explicit promise of sex.
It has also raised alarms among newspaper publishers, who see it as yet another threat to their lucrative market in career and real estate ads. A lengthy profile this week in New York magazine calls the on-line bulletin board “the Exploder of Journalism.”
Mr. Newmark certainly does not have the bearing of a corporate slayer. Standing in a hot room in front of a crowd of foreign reporters, he frequently turned to self-deprecating humour, laughing at times at his own private jokes, and often confessed that he didn't know what the company's future held, even in the near term.
The founder — who hired a chief executive officer seven years ago — was in New York this week to meet with real estate brokers to discuss a proposed $10 fee that Craigslist is planning to charge for apartment listings in the city. He conceded Wednesday that he is worried a higher fee might hurt smaller brokers.
Craigslist currently charges only for job postings advertised in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, though it is looking at expanding that list. Even with that limited source of income, Fortune magazine estimates the company had revenue of $50-million (U.S.) last year.
But Mr. Newmark said any new fee for advertising would adhere to a clear company policy.
“We only charge people who would otherwise be paying more money for less effective advertising,” he said.
The Craigslist founder sought to quell persistent rumours that eBay is planning to purchase his company. The on-line auctioneer does own 25 per cent of Craigslist — shares it purchased from a former Craigslist employee who was granted the stock in the early days — but Mr. Newmark said the company is not for sale, and that he has a good working relationship with eBay, which assists in fraud detection and control.
The founder also played down the site's impact on newspapers — saying the industry faces a host of competitors on the Web as well as other challenges. Still, one study in the San Francisco area estimated that Craigslist's real estate and career ads would be worth $50-million a year to the local newspapers.
