Not because I think its a better service, or anything.  In the end, I think that Craigslist just has too much inertia, but, I suppose if anyone has the clout and mainstream awareness — and the corporate willingness to spend on advertising and marketing to make it a fair go of it, I think it would be eBay.

But that’s besides the point.

The reason why my vote is with eBay is because I would like nothing better than to see Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark challenged on their hippie ethos at Craigslist.  You know — the “we’re not in the business of maximizing revenues” approach to things?  The “People should go where they get the best service — even if its not us” tack on things?

All fine and good.

And easy when you’re the biggest kid on the block, whose very size makes it all but impossible for any real competitors to sink their teeth into you.

But now that eBay has put on the gloves?  I’m real interested now, because this has the real makings of a real fight.  Real competition.  Maybe forcing Craigslist to do some real innovating, or re-think their ideals.

That is to say, perhaps forcing them to answer an unanswered question many people are thinking: what *would* a company do, which has a “delightful communist” at the helm, which has stated that things like “advertising” and “marketing” and other capitalistic practices are antithetical to its values — if it were ever given serious competition?   What would happen if its market share dropped 10%?

… 20%?

… or how about 40%?

Would this cause Craig Newmark to sweat?  Would they start doing something about it?  Or would they happily put a sign up linking to Kijiji because — clearly — *some* people *do* find that they’re better at being Craigslist than Craiglist?

Call me cynical, but I’m a little bit skeptical of the whole Craigslist message.  Its fine and convenient to have when you have no real competition.  But when push comes to shove, will they still uphold these values?

So, I got to meet Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigstlist at the Mesh Conference last week. And one thing struck me about the interview he did with Mark Evans that is only reinforced by the interview at Wired: Craigslist is an Internet phenomenon by any definition.

But Craig Newmark is no visionary. He’s no guru. And he’s no soothsayer. He’s a guy who lucked into his business, and it continues to succeed in spite of his lackadaisical efforts at starting it and running it.

No, I’m not referring to his anti-spam efforts — they may or may not be successful.

Rather, its a situation where he created a “half-assed” list of things that was happening in the San Francisco area, that ballooned into something much greater than itself. And thanks to some great timing (1996), Craigslist had the benefit of first-mover advantage that no other web concern has really had.

Profitable? Sure, in a way that makes VC’s drool. But classifieds are such a lean operation that it would be mind-boggling how it *couldn’t* be profitable.

I know one thing which drives me crazy is just how utterly slothful Craigslist is about monetizing itself. Jim Buckmaster was asked directly about the issue at Mesh, and basically gave the same answer that he gave for about 40 minutes: “we do what the community wants; if that’s not what the community wants, we won’t do it.”

To me, that strikes me as an enormous dodge, and a passing of the buck, as it were.

I respect the importance for sticking to your values. I understand that’s how Craigslist likes to clothe its business decisions. But not wanting to take advantage of an enormous opportunity to create an efficient business and maximize revenue — especially to do more Good … well, that doesn’t strike me as being wise. It just strikes me as being lazy.

I mean all this talk of having trying to take lessons from “unintended consequences”, an “unstructured approach”, and “getting out of the way when something good happens” — isn’t it as silly as trying to learn something from becoming the Prince of England? Mr. Newmark lucked into his good fortune, and continues to succeed, not because of some sophisticated corporate strategy, but the barest and most intuitive of tactics: listen to your customer.

Mr. Newmark might be a humble and affable gentleman. Mr. Buckmaster certainly seems so.

But let’s be honest — Craig Newmark was lucky as hell to stumble into Craigslist, and thanks to the enormous network effects and branding that’s generated out of it, it continues to grow into the behemoth it is today. In spite of what Craig and Jim do.

Some of whom I met, and some who I observed. All were interesting in their own ways.

1. Mike Arrington doesn’t want to be thought of as a guru — he wants to be first to report things. Being outrageous helps him, but why are you paying attention to him or what he’s saying? He’s not a guru or anything.

2. Tom Williams and Austin Hill *are* inspiring.

3. Loren Feldman is a funny guy and has a uniquely sharp talent of cutting through the BS in a funny way. That’s valuable. And funny. But I mentioned that already, didn’t I?

4. Paul Sullivan is a smart guy who knows a lot about journalism — and who is as enthusiastic as hell about it for being in the business as long as he has.

5. Steve Herrman has never been to Toronto or Canada until Mesh. I hope he had a good time. ;)

6. Ethan Kaplan is wicked smart. The way that he talks so smartly and so abstractly about — let’s face it, pirated music — makes it sound like thesis material. And it probably is for someone somewhere.

7. Richard Edelman, in spite of the Wal-mart fiasco, seemed really genuine about a desire for transparency and authenticity in public relations — in a this-guy-isn’t-faking-it kind of way. I mean it.

8. Jim Buckmaster only had one thing to say: “we do what the users want”. In spite of the wonder that is Craigslist, there wasn’t a lot of sophistication to his message. On the other hand, is that any surprise from someone described as a social anarchist or a communist?

9. Jeff Howe seems like a cool dude, and whose message about crowdsourcing was interesting and important: crowdsourcing is good for filtering. Not so much for certain kinds of content creation — like journalism.

10. Will Pate, in spite of his youthful looks, knows a hella lot about creating and maintaining community. How old is this guy anyway? :)

11. Lionel Menchaca was so down-to-earth and self-effacing about Dell’s community initiatives its a wonder that he’s a face of Dell. But he is. Which is amazing.

12. Ted Murphy isn’t the most evil man in the world, and PayPerPost isn’t. Well, probably isn’t. But he’s actually a pretty personable dude who really believes in what he does.

13. Mike Masnick is also wicked smart. I’m not sure who would win in a face off between him and Ethan Kaplan, but one thing’s for sure: *my* brain would explode.

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.