More:

•  On the newspaper industry:
  • I think its easy to point to the Internet when you’re laying people off to raise profit margins to please Wall Street.  In my mind its unfair to lay it our feet and its done to maximize performance.
• “Do you see a day where advertising is a greater percentage for newspaper companies?”
• What is Craig Newmark doing these days with new journalism?
  • He has participated in small investments in new media ventures that Craigslist isn’t involved in.  He still works full time for Craigslist, splitting his time between customer service and media events like late night television (laughter).
• Would you ever be interested in developing something to monetize transactions?
  • Unlike eBay, Craigslist transactions are between local individuals who pay with cash.  Its quite different so there is no plans to add a payment mechanism since there’s much less need for it.
• How *do* you make money?
  • We charge for job ads in 7 cities.  Job brokers pay a sum for apartment listings.  In the future there will be incremental things like more cities and more categories.  Multi-language support.
• What do you think of the future of interactions online?  Like reputations and identity?
  • The advantage of Craiglist is that people meet in person.  There are a handful of people that isn’t well intentioned, and that’s where technologists play a role to insulate the well-intentioned form the not-well intentioned.  We do need more help as technology grows because as it grows it changes things for everything.
• The architecture?
  • We use a LAMP structure, and other things to improve page load performance by compressing pages.  We keep trying to maximize pageviews per kilowatt hour, because we’re continuing to outgrow our co-location centers.  We’re running 7 billion pageviews on 200 servers, for example
• Within Web2.0, Ajax, and all of the bells and whistles — what is your take on this from a design point of view?
  • Users can be as creative with their pages as much as they want.  Page performance, usability and accessibility are priority.  We try and stay away from new technologies, because you end up excluding some users.  And we want people who are blind, or who have text only browsers, or decrepit browsers — we want them all to use our site.
• What’s your plans in 5 or 10 years time?
  • Well, we’re focused on our customers and that makes it simple.  We don’t have business people, there’s a tremendous flexibility in personnel as well.
• What factors do you think of when you start charging for services (and where?)
  • In 2003, the New York job boards were getting out of hands with automated posting software, and other techniques for MLM and get rich schemes.  We started hearing requests to bring fees to change the quality of postings — and we discussed this for over a year before instituting a fee.
  • For other cities its been around public discussion around how much to charge, where to charge it … and again in New York, broker listings was representings 30% of total listings.  The fee is a tool of last resort and its a lazy tool.  We could use all kinds of technological methods to battle the spamming listings, but with payment it all disappears.
• In six years its gone from 10 to 400 cities.  As Craigslist continues to grow, will your employee count also need to scale up?
  • New cities start from zero, where new users won’t see anything and come back later.  Its a chicken and egg thing unless they’re next to cities that use Craigslist.  Vancouver is on our top 20 and Toronto is on our top 30.
• Can you talk about the values within Craigslist?
  • I think that part of it is that Craig and most of our boys come from tech backgrounds — and average human instincts that when  you have plenty of money and no constraints to how you live that doesn’t get affected by MORE money … we’ve had the luxury of staying a private company, not ever taking investment money means that we can run it in a way that is fun and meaningful to us.  And we don’t think that many people would make different choices.
  • On other metrics than money:  People are turning to it more and more things for basic human needs.  I’m a Craigslist success story — I found my job on Craigslist.
• Not having investors — is eBay a silent investor?  What about video?
  • Ebay acquired a position from a former stakeholder who wanted to sell.  After a year or two process we were pleased to see that it was EBay.  We have collaborated with user protection.  If enough users want video we will be facilitate it.  We don’t try to be all things to all people — just
• What is the freakiest thing you ever seen listed?
  • A nude bible study is funny.  In Toronto’s best of section — a girl who was riding the subway near Spadina subway station.  “I spilled my grandmother on you … we got on the wrong foot but I’d love to meet for coffee” (she was in an urn).  A carton of live crickets — please call unless yohu’re angry and covered with crickets.
• Does Craiglist fear anyone or anything?
  • The dot-gov sector can be troubling.  The topic of net neutrality is unsettling.  You never really know what’s coming out of that sector.  What about Google?  Our focus is providing what users want.  If other companies are better positioned then they should migrate over to that.  The pageviews and users keep doubling every year so we don’t have any worries.
• Are there other engines of growth you might identify?
  • The usage of events is kind of important.  Katrina really changed the way Craiglist was used in New Orleans.  The stuff was ready to go, and the usage of Craigslist spike 50x and it stayed that way a long time as people started looking for people — and offers of free housing all over the US, followed by free offers of jobs, ride sharing and so on.  9/11 in New York City also changed usage of Craigslist there.  When basic human needs rise to the forefront then that can be a driver.
• Do you have any ideas and taking this amazing asset towards philanthropic causes?
  • We do get that question from time to time. If we started hearing a chorus of that from users that’d something we would do.  We just don’t seem ordained to collect money and redistribute it from non-profits.  People already have money to do that already.  Users haven’t asked us to do that, and that’s not something that we have any special expertise in.