Imagine what it might have been like to be Dr Kleenex. You invent a modern miracle, the cheap paper handkerchief, and suddenly you become the person blamed for America’s disposable culture, praised for a more convenient life, or both.
Listing gains: Craig Newmark scoffs at the notion that his popular free website is strangling newspapers.
There never was a Dr Kleenex, though—the product was created by a team of researchers at Kimberly-Clark laboratories in the 1920s. But there is a real Craig in Craigslist, and lately he is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh most popular website in the US.
It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers—indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified advertising business.
An ardently no-frills, ad-free, user-sensitive site, Craigslist has, by the estimate of its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, generated more than 600 million free classified listings. Though nearly all listings remain free, Craigslist has added modest fees for job listings and real estate brokers in certain big cities, and from those fees, the firm generates $80-100 million (Rs331-414 crore) in annual revenue. It has a staff of 25, including Newmark.
In the US and beyond, Craig-slist is digging even deeper into the classified ad markets. Once, an announcement that Craigslist was expanding mea-nt adding cities such as Miami, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. These days, it means places such as Janesville, Wisconsin, (population: about 60,000) and Farmington, New Mexico, (roughly 38,000) as well as Ce-bu in the Philippines and, by Newmark’s request, a site for Ramallah on the West Bank.
In the face of this expansion, Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism—not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth”.
Sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco a month ago, explaining his plans in neat, mathematical style, Newmark presented an unassuming public presence. He was perched on an ordinary seat, a six-year-old Prius parked nearby, a Kangol beret on his balding head.
Newmark used to spend two-thirds of his time working on customer service issues, he said, and the remaining one-third on “founder issues”, a catchall term he uses for his public-spirited work. That division, he said, would now be half and half. But before he can extricate himself from customer issues, Newmark will have to resolve some of the growing business and legal complexities that surround Craigslist, a laid-back operation that is bumping into tough-minded competitors.