MEDIA POST -- Dec 7 -- In what turned out to be a culture clash of near-epic proportions, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster spoke to the investment community this morning at the UBS global media conference in New York. UBS analyst Ben Schachter asked Buckmaster a standard financial world question: How does the site plan to maximize revenue? The CEO of the online classifieds site answered as follows: "That definitely is not part of the equation. It's not part of the goal. I think a lot of people are catching their breath right now," responded Schachter, as the crowd absorbed Buckmaster's remarks. Buckmaster, on stage in jeans and a blazer, insisted that the company--which has emerged as a significant threat to newspapers and other companies that sell classified ads--doesn't especially want to make money. Schachter asked if the company considered Google AdSense ads. Buckmaster said "We've had the numbers crunched for us. The numbers are quite staggering [but] no users have been requesting that we run text ads, so for us, that's the end of the story."
Mark Brooks: Yup, that's Craigslist for you. But it's partly that sentiment that has cause them to grow so big. Anyone who knows Craigs knows the last thing he will ever do is sell out his community. He didn't create Craigslist, the community created Craigslist. Still, how's a l'il Adsense box going to hurt. Hmm. Just a little three ad section at the bottom. (It'll never happen, unless eBay finds a way to buy another 25% of Craigslist). Other Craigslist news.
I think anyone who has used craigslist would say that the site would be better with more users. Sure there is the savvy community that knows the site, but many people still don't. If they invested every dollar they made from adsense into getting the word out and growing market share, the site will ultimately become much better and capable of defending the large media companies (like a google) building copycat concepts.
Posted by: Bill Broadbent | Dec 08, 2006 at 08:08 AM
I think this is going back to the roots and excitement of the internet, when we first got involved many many years ago, the web was about enabling and improving. Recently it has been taken back over by a business mentality. There is very little for a dating, social networking site to charge a large amount if anything for its service, this is clear from the recent sites like www.shuffleyourdancecards.com offering salsa partners for free compared to its competitors who are charging $30/month. As web 2.0 continues and new projects continue there will be a complete step change, and as MIFID comes into play in Europe over the next 2 years the payment industry will also catch up. The different space is the adult dating space where the nature of legality and blacklisting makes this a more confusing matter due to the need for separation legally and infrastructurally to prevents cross contamination
Posted by: Si | Dec 18, 2006 at 11:50 AM