Honest question
Does anyone know how craigslist makes money?
eBay wanted to buy Craigslist whole hog when it scooped up a minority stake in the classifieds website in 2004, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman told a judge on Monday. Whitman said the online tat house was looking to expand into new markets when it purchased a 28 per cent stake in the company from an early Craigslist …
For things like jobs and the like, they actually charge. The usual craigslist stuff is a loss leader.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees
Considering they charge $75 a job posting in SF bay area, for example, and that there's over 400 job postings in that area for just today, I'd imagine it works out really well.
"Whitman .... told the court that her former company made it clear from the start of talks that it was interested in owning the entire company."
In the past, I made it clear to various people that I was interested in forming a committed, long term relationship. They often were upset after I screwed them and moved on.
It needs to be reiterated that craigslist never expected or desired an organization like eBay to have a stake in the company. It was a hostile situation from the start.
It was a naive act on the part of Craig to assign a huge block of shares in his namesake company to an untrustworthy person who ended up leaving and making a huge profit by selling those shares to eBay. I can't believe the former shareholder did not know how disastrous such a sale would be viewed by craigslist. But craigslist could do little about it once it happened.
It must have felt sickening to have that fox in the henhouse all those years, and I really don't blame them at all for trying to dilute eBay's stake. eBay and Meg Whitman pretty much stand in opposition to most of craigslist's core values. And craigslist is nothing if not an organization who has steadfastly stuck to those values, something that we certainly can't say for eBay. I don't doubt that the idea of an eBay-assimiliated craigslist with his name on it would be an extremely troubling situation for Craig to endure.