Episode Spotlight

How about 3 billion page views per month? Craig Newmark has achieved this success with craigslist, a local online community of classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else, for free (Q&A - Customer control of craigslist website). Craigslist is comprised of 190 sites in all 50 US states, and 35 countries, resulting in more than 6 million classified ads and 1 million forum postings each month.

Q&A - Trademark infringement question for Craig

Grab a pen and paper - as Craig shares his secret recipe for baking a website rich with traffic (Q&A - Website usability and design), an effective viral marketing strategy, as well as his unique definition of success.

About Craig Newmark and craigslist.org

In early 1995, Craig Newmark created an e-mail list to tell his friends about events around the San Francisco Bay area. Those friends forwarded the e-mail to others. Over time, people started posting items on the list in different areas, jobs, stuff for sale, and apartments. Craig wrote software which could automatically add email postings to a site which became www.craigslist.org.

craigslist.org was incorporated as a for-profit in 1999, but maintains the ".org" domain, as a symbol of their service mission and non-corporate culture. In 2000 Jim Buckmaster became craigslist's president & CEO and in 2004 eBay acquired 25% of the equity in craigslist from a former shareholder.

Headquartered in a Victorian house in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, craigslist operations are supported by charging businesses below-market rates for help wanted ads. Craig has opted to stepped away from "many tens of millions of dollars" - instead fulfilling his definition of success through craigslist's values:

• Giving people a voice
• A sense of trust and intimacy
• Consistency of down-to-earth values
• Simplicity
• No charges, except for job postings
• Freshness of the material
• No ads, particularly no banner ads