Craigslist
craigslist is a highly popular network of urban community networking forums, featuring free classified advertisements (for housing, personals, sale/wanted, services, community, and events categories) and forums, sorted by various topics. Its main source of revenue comes from advertisements in the jobs category for select cities ($75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area and $25 per ad for New York and Los Angeles). It was founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark for the San Francisco Bay Area and became a privately held company in 1999.
Having observed people (on the Net, The WELL, and Usenet) helping one another in a friendly, social and trusting community way, Newmark decided to create something similar for local San Francisco events. Soon word-of-mouth and popular demand led to the addition of new categories, and "the list" soon became large enough to demand the use of a list server (majordomo), which required a name. Friends started calling it "Craig's list", and the name stuck. Craigslist has since grown to be one of the most heavily-used sites in the world, with new sub-sections for 32 large "metros" in the US, Canada and UK, including New York, London, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Portland, Washington, DC, and Vancouver.
Newmark says that craigslist works because it gives people a voice, and a sense of community trust and even intimacy. Other factors he cites are consistency of down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity. In lieu of real banner advertising, Craigslist staff for a short time posted mock-banner ads, as a humourous substitute.
After first being approached about running banner ads, Newmark decided to make Craigslist non-commercial. He was joined by other people with new ideas, having events to bring people face-to-face, and creating a nonprofit foundation as part of Craigslist.
In 2003, a documentary was made, by Michael Ferris Gibson.
On August 13, 2004, Craig that auction giant eBay had purchased a 25% stake in the company from a former employee. Some fans of craigslist have expressed concern that this development will harm the site's longtime non-commercial nature, but it remains to be seen what ramifications the change will actually have.
See also
