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How Craigslist Makes Money

forbes.com

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Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#92
post #12

Why doesn't Craigslist have mobile apps?

Craigslist has the best mobile app out there. It can be found at https://www.craigslist.org

That is the correct answer - provided that your parent was serious.

I cling to the hope that your parent was actually joking.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craig probably did some math and found out that even if he lives to 800 years old, he will not be able to spend it all so why go nuts? This way everything is manageable and he doesn't need to report to anyone.

I'm surprised that more successful people don't do this? Is the drive that lead them to absurd success what leads them to continue well beyond needing to? I find it hard to imagine hitting $10 million and not just dropping everything and spending the rest of my life on random hobbies and traveling. Maybe that's why I don't have $10 million?

I think for most people in that situation, working is easier than relaxing.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#94
post #12

Why doesn't Craigslist have mobile apps?

Craigslist is one of the best pages on the internet. It's functional, it loads fast, it doesn't have a stack built of buzzwords and bullshit. It works on every device everywhere. I mean, what business does a page have being megabytes and megabytes if it's gonna display a couple bytes of text? None. It doesn't matter if it's "technically free" these days, that's just bad design and engineering.

Craiglist design actually sucks. When I first used it, the whole thing was almost revolting from design perspective. Where some people see simplicity, others see utter lack of modernity, friendliness and affordability. I still can't get some of my relative to use it (they ask me to post on their behalf!). Before you cite page counts, revenues and unique users, think about how many people are not using it despite the fact everyone has heard about it and everyone has a need to sell something on and off. Amazon UX is almost complete opposite of craiglist but is usable by much much wider audience.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#95

Forbes is unequivocally the worst website I have the displeasure of being linked to on a regular basis. Readability is quickly approaching 0. This page kept hijacking my scroll thru the article to keep an ad at the top of my window. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

Overall, most press/journalism sites I use are terrible. Performance stinks, flash everywhere, ads that nobody clicks on. Horrible.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be trivial to implement something that's 10 times better... What would you be optimizing for? What changes could you make that wouldn't increase the page size or slow the loading speed?

- Global / Region search - Alerts - Some kind of historical record of ads - Increased focus on listing from your mobile phone (camera)

Craigslist has alerts:

    https://www.craigslist.org/about/saved_searches_and_alerts
I think your idea of making it easier to post from a phone is a good one. For things like global search, I'm pretty sure that's made difficult to do intentionally.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#97

I think they are doing it right. Just find a niche and work at it progressively through life. No need to raise $100M D Rounds, no need to have an explosive exit, whatever. I think it would be nice to just steadily have six figures, work on something I love and live life (a la Basecamp). Most of all: Have complete control of your destiny. No investors, no bosses, etc.

Niche FTW definitely. But I think it'd be hard to find something that's "steady". I run my own business and it's always changing -- the market's changing, the technologies are changing.

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#98
post #68
post #3

I was wondering how they got that number; basically they use a $690M revenue guess from a third party, apply a valuation multiple from eBay and then multiply by the 42% Newmark owns. Craigslist is unique; it isn't entirely profit driven and as far as Alexa 1000 sites; it might have stayed closest to it's original founding philosophy. I am not sure how they make money; iirc it was only a few select markets and select…

> I was wondering how they got that number; basically they use a $690M revenue guess from a third party, apply a valuation multiple from eBay and then multiply by the 42% Newmark owns. It's not that dubious. The methodology is as simple and straightforward as it gets: > AIM's Zollman, who called his company's Craigslist revenue estimate "conservative," said the AIM Group counts up listings for each category in variou…

I agree; and didn't say it was dubious. That said; the title was phrased with a slight negative connotation; before it was changed it was like:

Newmark was an idealist; now he's a billionaire

He is likely a paper billionaire but the article didn't really prove to me he's less of an idealist not that he would sell; making that figure hypothetical.

Sure he's rich; but he could be much more so and the reason is ethics and idealism. So too me; I think saying the company is worth x; and he owns most of it fails to consider he likely wouldn't sell and has built a profitable business users love while remaining humble and ignoring greed

Edit: I know of one large anonymous donation he has made personally and I an nowhere near connected or know anyone that knows him personally

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#99
post #72
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not much of an investment person, but 600M for a classified site is actually pretty impressive for an old, well-established company. If they are able to maintain a high profit with low operation cost, then buyer can project more earning in the future. There is no absolute Craigslist will always make 600M a year. They may lose 10M next year or go bankrupt in ten years. So for 3B for the ten-year forecast (I don't…

I think you are assuming that I meant insane in the sense that this was not a conservative estimate. That's sort of what I said, but it's clear from context that I meant the opposite. This estimate seems far too conservative to even count as an estimate, more of a trivial lower bound.

Actually when I read it again it still sounded like you think the valuation is too high. I think this is because you instantly said insane after saying the valuation is 3B. That's how I read it "that 3B valuation? It's insane." It is hard to guess which sentiment was applied. But now you cleared up your opinion on this, I appreicate it. You were trying to say "3B valuation? Wow that's impressive!"

Re: How Craigslist Makes Money

#100

Forbes is unequivocally the worst website I have the displeasure of being linked to on a regular basis. Readability is quickly approaching 0. This page kept hijacking my scroll thru the article to keep an ad at the top of my window. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

I had to copy the text and paste it into Notepad to actually read the article.
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