Wired takes on Craigslist founder, who promptly walks into a door

August 25, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

2009_09Wired writer Gary Wolf has done the best job ever of capturing the enigmatic, inspiring, yet clumsy personality of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. If you’ve ever met Craig at a party and found it hard to hold a conversation with him, don’t feel bad. Charlie Rose had the same problem on national TV.

Wolf’s assessment of Newmark’s business is that Craigslist has refused to evolve, in part because Newmark is happier replying to customer support email than managing product development. “Aside from his communication problems and an aversion to exerting authority,” Wolf writes, “he care[s] nothing for entrepreneurship.” As a result, Craigslist blooms with a thousand kinds of flowers, but also a lot of weeds:

“Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier’s checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. Other evils are more subtle. Business owners whose judgment is distorted by self-interest fail to understand the rules and put the same item in multiple categories or repost it many times a day to insure it stays prominent, crowding out other sellers. A woman listing a car forgets to tell buyers about problems with the title until they’ve made a long trip out to see it. In all transactions there is a possibility of misunderstanding as well as abuse, and at 99.99 percent perfection there would still be thousands of angry people every month.”

Craig is different from most Internet startup founders. He’s an introvert. He’s not much interested in wealth or in being treated as a VIP. He doesn’t care to follow the latest fads in site designs and features. Craigslist has no Ajax interface, no big happy pastel text, nearly no graphics or images other than those placed in posts by customers. The site doesn’t try to get users to become members of a social network, sign up their friends, or tag, rate, and comment on content created by others. Craigslist hasn’t built an iPhone app. Yet its reach keeps on growing, in part because of Newmark’s dogged ability to contentedly perform the same tasks over and over. He reads and answers a huge chunk of the company’s customer mail:

“Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many. He has a boss now, a customer service manager named Clint Powell, who was hired about six years ago. But he maintains his habits for reasons that have little to do with the normal logic of work. They are part of his identity, an unconventional mode of self-realization through which he took hold of a barrier that always separated him from the world and made it into a kind of performance. Athletes compete. Artists create. Newmark answers email. He knows that this will seem absurd from the outside, but he is blessed not to care. In fact, he likes to treat people to a laugh when he can. It’s sometimes impossible to discern his intention exactly, and this is essential to the effect. On our way out of the cafè, I step aside to let Newmark go ahead, and he walks face-first into the plate glass door.”

Customers seem to sense that Craig and his team are on their side, rather than trying to monetize them. That feeling has built an astonishing level of customer loyalty and fondness for the site. No one remembers MetroVox, the much more aggressively commercial site built in 1999 by Newmark’s former business partner. Customers who found themselves redirected from secondary Craigslist URLs to the slicker-looking MetroVox back-buttoned their way to Newmark’s site.

ff_craigslist2_fVC Fred Wilson culled these stats on Craigslist:

  • This site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo’s HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined.
  • With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation’s adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped.
  • One recent report, from a consulting firm that counted the paid ads, estimates that revenue could top $100 million in 2009. Should craigslist ever be sold, the price likely would run into the billions.
  • Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30.
  • Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings.

For a lot of tech entrepreneurs and the journalists who cover them, Newmark’s way of doing business is somewhere between bewildering and ridiculous. Yet there are plenty of people of a different type who are reading this post and wondering: Are they hiring? Don’t ask me, ask Craig.

[Photos: Wired]

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • This is repeating the words of Wired; joining the rant and --probably-- taking advantage in visits because of it. I don't see the problems in the Charlie Rose Interview (here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8605)

    Sometimes money, number of workers and "buzz" (noise, some would say) in the interweb, etc. is not the core value of some companies: Patagonia, Craigslist.org, REI and several others.

    So accountability to users (some of them older than baby-boomers) is a good enough goal. Don't you think?
  • Perhaps it's good for users that Newmark is "not much interested in wealth or in being treated as a VIP". People like craigslist for exactly the way it is...simple and low cost. This article is clearly posted to not serve user interest, but instead to pressure Newmark into changing his methods into a more profit driven and submissive midst for the large businesses that would love to get a piece of Craigslist, either through ownership or 'services'.

    The fact alone that Newmark focuses on resolving customer service inquiries shows that he's more devoted to users than to charging them extra fees or making every penny possible from them.

    Instead of criticizing him, we should be applauding his disinterest in profiteering and giving into media manipulators. Who cares about "the latest fads in site designs and features". That's like saying "I needed to brush my teeth so I went to the orthodontist for a checkup." Toothpaste work well when you need it, and so does craigslist. There will always be few dumb craigslist users that give out their private information without doing background checks or protecting themselves, adding additional features for security (and ultimately charging more somewhere along the line) won't ever make all men equal in their decision making.
  • Craig Newmark’s way of doing business is somewhere between bewildering and ridiculous, UNIX is also boring yet incalculably better than Microsoft OS.
  • gregcollier
    I applaud Gary Wolf and Wired for the well-researched article on the anomalous characters and odd decisions going on behind the scenes at Craigslist. For a business with this much traffic and this much income, the problems its users encounter day after day, post after post, are really beyond comprehension. They make enough money to fix this stuff, folks – and they refuse to do it!

    And that’s not all they refuse to fix. Over the last few years, newspapers and television news stories across the country have been reporting stories about victims – from theft to rape to murder – whose only mistake was responding to a Craigslist ad. Note to Craig: telling us that “most people are good,” is not a sufficient answer! For years, law enforcement agencies have been fighting with Craigslist to clean up the obvious illegal activities on the site – and Craigslist has repeatedly balked or stalled.

    The word is spreading that Craigslist is a dangerous place to buy, sell, or look for a date. This is sad state of affairs in an era when technologies exist to ferret out much of the illegal activity, and good old fashioned monitoring can clean up much of the rest – and yet Craigslist resorts to a flag system that, as your article points out, benefits troublemakers as readily as legitimate users. Yes, the criminals are in the minority; I’ll give Craig and Buckmaster that. But the problem is this: more than on any other site I’ve ever seen (and I work in this industry), criminals flock to Craigslist.

    Buckmaster’s analogy to GM seems an effort to confuse the issue. Autos come with safety ratings, and manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure their cars’ safety ratings – because people’s lives are at stake. And that’s just the point. Craigslist users have every right to expect that their safety come before some abstract concept of “democracy.”

    This is probably the most important difference between Craigslist and the community classifieds site I operate. At Geebo.com, we monitor our community classifieds to make every experience as safe and enjoyable as possible.

    We pay attention to our users, and we are constantly improving our technologies and systems. Given how hard we work at this, it’s hard to watch the arrogance and nonsense that go on at Craigslist. When users run into problems there, they get a haiku? Give me a break! Why would anyone intentionally create a system where users’ concerns are mocked rather than addressed?

    People aren’t fools: as long as Craigslist refuses to evolve, the site will increasingly be defined by bugs, scams and illegal activities – risks and frustrations that fewer and fewer users will be willing to put up with. Please let your readers know that there are alternatives to Craigslist – including ours. I welcome every Craigslist user to surf on over to Geebo where we work hard to make yours a safe, easy, enjoyable and successful community classifieds experience.