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.

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.

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.