It was a few days ago now, but the New York Times’ DealBook blog had a great little item about Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster meeting with Wall Street types at the UBS global media conference. Naturally, the analysts wanted to hear a bit about the gazillions of page views that Craigslist gets, and how it is making about $50-million or so a year without even trying.
Jim, however, said the site had no real interest in maximizing revenue. Although he and Craig had looked at running ads, they had no plans to do so, he said, because — get this — users hadn’t said they wanted them. The only reason that Craigslist charges fees at all (to professional real estate agents for posting apartment ads in several cities) is that users complained about the ads, so the fees were instituted as a way of driving them away.
In the DeaBook pieces, Wendy Davis of MediaPost describes the presentation as a “a culture clash of near-epic proportions.†She says UBS analyst Ben Schachter asked how Craigslist planned to maximize revenue. We don’t have any such plans, Mr. Buckmaster said. “It’s not part of the goal.†Mr. Schachter’s response: “I think a lot of people are catching their breath right now.” I’ll bet.
Craigslist currently gets a mind-blowing 5 billion page views or so a month. A premier site like Craigslist — and one that is focused on classified advertising, which is inherently purchasing-type behaviour — would likely command a fairly high CPM rate for ads. Let’s say theoretically it was $10 per thousand. That would bring in $50-million a month (StartupBoy says Craigslist is worth more than eBay, and he doesn’t even include ads).
But Craig would rather focus on the user. Brilliant? Or deluded?
Update:
Kevin Burton of TailRank says that Craigslist should be taking all that money from advertising and giving it to the poor (he expands on that idea here), but that Craig “thinks money is evil” (Craig responds in the comments that that isn’t true). Chuqui says Kevin and others should leave Craig alone and that Craigslist is being true to its vision. The Scobleizer agrees, and so does Nick Douglas at Eat The Press. And Dan Farber and larry Dignan at ZDNet took on this issue back on Dec. 7
