Building A Web Business — Mark Evans interviews Jim Buckmaster of Craiglist.

• How did it start?
  • Craig Newmark started an email cc list that listed cool tech listings.  People started contributing their own listings for apartments etc, in 1996 a simple interface was created and it expanded organically from there.  Why has it been popular?  We’ve been around for 12 years, and its popular for all kinds of human needs.
• The site is not sexy but effective.
  • Many of the user sections are, though (laughter)
• The default for dot-com startups is to move into cool spaces, but you guys don’t operates that way.  How do you guys operate?
  • We still work in the same Victorian house, we have 20 some odd employees, 2/3 tech, we have no marketing department — the site is all about its users, and we’re trying to get the information out as many ways as we can.
• Craigslist has done very little traditional marketing.  Any advice towards establishing a brand?
  • I guess the simple answer is that we’ve never marketed.  For us we’ve been content to make the site as useful as possible, and the word of mouth tends to be powerful  Its not uncommon for us to get emails that say that they’ve assembled their entire lives with it — pretty powerful stuff.
• How as Craiglist stayed at the top of the pack?
  • I’m not sure why we’ve stayed in the position we’ve been in.  All we do is work on what users ask for.  All we do is model what our users want.  Profit oriented companies end of doing things that are often contrary to what users want.
• Why doesn’t Craigslist charge for more of its services?
  • We’ve had the luxury of being profitable since 1999.  We figure we’re making enough money for all of our needs — and we don’t want to be in the business of NOT running the site in the way that it is now.  Its fun rather than worrying about making more and more money.  Its not a fun game to be in.  When you have outside investors or publicly traded you have less choices.  We haven’t needed to turn to that so we can do these kinds of things.
• Where do you see Classifieds going online?
  • Historically its been in print.  90% of classified revenue is in print.  The Internet allows classified ads to be better and that migration from classifieds offline to online will continue.