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craigslist

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Craigslist (craigslist communities) is an online directory including classified ads and a community message board for specific urban areas. Creator Craig Newmark launched the site in 1995 in San Francisco; it is currently located in nearly 200 cities worldwide. Now the top classified ads service, craigslist is in the top ten of Internet companies.

Last updated: April 25, 2006.

craigslist

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Computer Desktop Encyclopedia:

Craig's list

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A Web site of classified ads and community notices that serves an urban area. It was started in 1995 in San Francisco by Craig Newmark and has since spread to hundreds of cities in more than 50 countries. Listings are free, but job and rental postings in major cities are paid. For more information, visit www.craigslist.org.

Old Fashioned and Thriving

Instead of a glitzy home page with animations, banner ads and eye candy, craigslist home pages are mostly columns of text. However, Newmark's philosophy of keeping things simple has caused craigslist to rival eBay and Amazon in number of online users wanting to buy and sell. While eBay and Amazon are public companies with thousands of employees, as of mid-2009, craigslist is a private company with less than three dozen. See Angie's list.

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Gale Directory of Company Histories:

craigslist, inc.

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Type: Private Company
Address: 1381 9th Avenue, San Francisco, California, 94122, U.S.A.
Telephone: (415) 566-6394
Toll Free: (800) 664-0633
Fax: (415) 504-6394
Web: http://www.craigslist.org
Employees: 24
Sales: $25 million (2006 est.)
Incorporated: 1999
NAIC: 516110 Internet Publishing and Broadcasting

Based in San Francisco's Cole Valley neighborhood, craigslist, inc., is a web site whose proponents describe it as a "community that uses internet technology to provide a platform for people to use to help other people." More than 20 million people in 450 cities in more than 50 countries use craigslist each month, creating 17 million classified ads for jobs, housing, goods, services, romance, and local activities, and sharing their opinions and advice on forums. Craigslist receives more than seven billion page views per month. It supports itself by charging below-market fees for job ads in seven cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

1994-99: From One Man's Social Calendar to Internet Phenomenon

In the early 1990s, Craig Newmark, a systems security consultant for Charles Schwab, was looking for a way to improve his social life. Newmark had had a long career in computers; from 1976 to 1993, after leaving New Jersey and earning undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science from Case Western Reserve University, he became a senior associate programmer and then an advisory open systems specialist for IBM. Newmark, a self-described "nerd," planted the seed for craigslist in 1994 with the "honest intent of connecting with community, of trying to connect with other people. ... In our culture, I think we crave that," he explained in a San Francisco Chronicle article in 2004. Newmark's e-mail list, which he circulated among friends and acquaintances in his new hometown of San Francisco, contained events and happenings in and around the Bay Area.

Newmark's list grew by word of mouth and became extremely popular. "[M]ore people wanted in on the thing. Over time people started to say, 'Hey, can we put this job on there?' or 'Can you post this thing I want to sell?'" Newmark recounted in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. When the dot-com boom created an apartment shortage in San Francisco, he started to post apartment listings. By the middle of 1995, Newmark had about 240 names on his list, and the e-mail tool he was using started to break down. Consequently, he began to use a list server, which meant he needed a name for his undertaking. He thought about calling his brainchild SF Events, but people were already calling it craigslist; he went with the eponym instead.

Soon after Newmark started craigslist, he left Schwab and started doing software contracting in 1995. This arrangement gave him more time off as well as more income. Newmark made use of his coding expertise, and craigslist metamorphosed into an unadorned web site. According to Newmark in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article, "[I]n December 1998, I was told by some of our customers that things needed fixing. After a certain amount of procrastination and denial, I admitted they were right. I left the startup I had briefly joined and started making a real company."

By 1999 it became clear, according to Newmark in the same 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article, that "we had to become a serious business. ... We were trying to do it with volunteers, and things were falling apart." He incorporated his company as a for-profit venture with a staff of four, using the ".org" designation to indicate craigslist's commitment to community and nonprofits. "The org indicates intent, in the sense that we're like a commons," he explained in the Economist in 2004.

The following year, Newmark hired Jim Buckmaster, who had been doing web programming and who had posted his resume on craigslist in late 1999. Buckmaster became the company's president and chief executive in 2000. His background included a biochemistry degree from Virginia Tech, a stint at medical school, and a decade in a commune in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Together, Newmark and Buckmaster split up the responsibilities of running the business, whose staff numbered about 12, according to their talent and inclination. Buckmaster, who was far less social than Newmark, took on the administrative issues of the business. Newmark took over customer service, following up on complaints about postings and personally answering all of his e-mail from a café in his neighborhood called the Reverie.

2000-04: Maximizing Social Capital, Giving Back to the Community

From the start, craigslist steered clear of banner ads, pop-ups, give-aways, stock quotes, sports scores, and hot links. In addition, customers did not need to register to use the site. Because the company did not attempt to maximize revenues, it was able to exist without sales, marketing, or advertising teams or a plan for business development. It used open source software, such as Linux, which meant it had no licensing costs to pay. "We try to maximize social capital rather than financial capital," explained Jim Buckmaster in a 2006 Daily Telegraph article of the philosophy that held sway at craigslist from the start. "We get a lot of personal satisfaction from all the thank-you notes we get from people. We have it pretty darn good. We just don't see any reason to try and put a bunch of zeros at the end of bank balances that are perfectly adequate."

"We're not so much anti-capitalist," said Buckmaster, who lived in a rented house and had never owned a car. "We're fortunate enough to have built a very healthy business, even though we haven't attempted to." Newmark, who owned a modest home in San Francisco and drove a Toyota Prius, explained it thus in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001. "I have no objections to being rich, and I'm sure not anti-commercial, but we made a conscious decision about what craigslist was all about. And it's not about making money."

The craigslist team also dedicated itself to giving back to the nonprofit community. Each year beginning in 1995, it held an annual craigslist party in San Francisco. In 1999, it organized a nonprofit venture forum where six nonprofits (from among 40 that auditioned) could present their cause and solution to social entrepreneurs who possessed the financial and technical means to make things happen. In 2000, it distributed most of its revenues of about $60,000 to charities or to community groups as cash grants through the new nonprofit craigslist Foundation. It also teamed up to work with Bay Area nonprofits dedicated to bringing technology to grassroots organizations. In recognition of its many accomplishments on behalf of the community, craigslist won a Webby in 2000 for being the best community web site from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

The list continued to grow, although it kept its noncommercial aesthetic; it featured no fancy graphics or moving pictures, which would slow down page loading, and stuck to plain text and hyperlinked words for navigating among its various categories. It had "all the visual appeal of a pipe wrench," according to Buckmaster in a 2007 Globe and Mail article. Beginning in 2000, craigslist began to add other cities. Boston was first, followed by Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Sacramento.

Newmark explained the process for adding a new city to the site in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle, "We put up a city based on how many people are asking us to do so. It's also based on Jim's perception of a city's demographics and the city's broadband penetration and intuition. We use word of mouth to get the word out, though sometimes the local press is kind." All cities came under the umbrella of craigslist and used the same URL, although each relied upon its own local volunteers. "Our philosophy is, find people in other places with the same spirit as craigslist. We'll provide the technical backup," Newmark explained in a May 2000 Investor's Business Daily article.

By 2001, there were 13 American cities and one Canadian city on craigslist, which together received a total of 60 million page hits per month and published 170,000 classifieds and 54,000 postings on discussion boards. By the start of 2004, there were close to 30 craigslist cities across the United States, one in Canada, and one in England. Five million unique visitors came aboard craigslist each month and totaled up one billion page views. By the end of the year, craigslist hosted close to 60 different cities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, India, and Brazil.

As the number of postings on craigslist soared into the multiple millions, there were, of course, some bad apples in the bunch. The site made a policy of tolerating no hate-filled postings and none that took advantage of minors, but there were no site moderators. Craigslist relied upon site visitors to alert it to offending postings, which it would then remove, as Newmark explained in the 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article: "[I]f anyone sees an ad they feel is wrong, they can flag it for removal. If enough people agree, it's removed. ... Whenever there is a problem and a person just keeps doing this [posting inappropriately], we try reasoning with them. That usually works."

Revenues grew apace with craigslist's popularity and its steadily increasing flow of traffic, as did its staff. In 2003, the staff of 12 made the decision, after polling users to see what they thought, to start charging $75 for employment ads on its San Francisco site to solve the problem of repeated listings for the same position. By 2004, revenues had reached around $7 million and the staff numbered 15. The mayor of San Francisco pronounced October 10, 2004, craigslist Day in the Golden Gate City. A documentary on craigslist, called 24 Hours on craigslist, also appeared in 2004.

Beginning around 2001, Newmark received regular offers to sell craigslist, which he summarily turned down. In August 2004, however, a former craigslist employee sold 25 percent of the firm to eBay for somewhere between $12 million and $15 million. Newmark had given the equity away some years earlier as a means of "establishing checks and balances" within the company. He admitted that the sale had not been part of his plan, but he was "happy with the results." The partnership with eBay allowed the two companies to share knowledge, expertise, and programming. It helped craigslist expand into overseas cities, developing non-English-language versions and shutting down overseas spammers and scammers. EBay, for its part, benefited from craigslist's listing model.

2005-07: Challenging Classifieds Ads with Its Astronomical Growth

By early 2005, craigslist had grown to serve more than 75 cities and was attracting more than six million visitors and three million postings per month; by the end of the year, there were close to 200 cities and two billion hits by as many as eight million unique viewers. Nielsen/NetRatings ranked craigslist 13th on the top 20 list of general interest portals and community destinations on the Web. It earned between $7 million and $10 million in revenues from its New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles job listings. Users viewed the job pages more than any other area, yet the 160,000 job postings monthly constituted only slightly more than 3 percent of the site's five million classifieds. In New York alone, from mid-2004 to 2005, site usage grew 25 percent; during the same period nationally, usage of craigslist increased 73 percent. By year's end, craigslist attracted 9.8 million users per month in the United States.

By this time, magazines and journals were beginning to talk about the effect that craigslist was having in the marketplace where sales of classifieds were sluggish and help-wanted ads were slow. In 2005, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. began to offer its own free classifieds for the sale of low-cost merchandise. Other Internet giants, such as Google, Microsoft, and eBay, all three of which had introduced rival classified services by 2006, presented their own increased competition. However, craigslist was not "losing sleep over competition," according to Buckmaster in a 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article. "Use of our site continues to grow rapidly to the point of challenging us to keep up with it."

In an impressive growth spurt, in November 2006 alone, the site added 130 new cities, and, by 2007, when it added the feature of a voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) link that hid user contact numbers, there were 450 local listings services in 50 states and 50 countries. Revenues, still limited to fees for recruitment ads in seven U.S. cities--San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, and San Diego--and apartment ads in New York City had brought in an estimated $25 million in 2006. In addition, though still relatively unknown in the United Kingdom, where there were ten cities on craigslist, traffic there had tripled in 2006.

Newmark claimed in a June 2007 Presstime article not to notice the development. "We only look at numbers for our own curiosity and for the performance curve. We have no advertisers to keep happy, no investors to keep happy--which is a great relief." Asked whether craigslist could be a model for a successful business in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article, Newmark replied, "Well there's a basic cliché that I guess applies: 'Doing well by doing good.'" At 15 million unique users and seven billion hits a month by mid-2007, craigslist was the ninth most popular U.S. web site and 37th most popular in the world, according to www.Alexa.com. The company, quite obviously, was helping further the vision of the Internet as democratic, accessible to all, and noncommercial, and serving as a powerful community-building tool around the world.

Principal Competitors

Friendster, Inc.; Meetup Inc.; Tribe Networks, Inc.; Evite; Lavalife Inc.; LinkedIn Corporation; Monster Worldwide, Inc.; MySpace.com; Tickle Inc.; Yahoo! Inc.

Further Reading

Cave, Andrew, "Jim Buckmaster Craigslist Chief Executive," Daily Telegraph (U.K.), March 18, 2006, p. 34.

"Craigslist; On the Record: Craig Newmark," San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2004, p. J1.

"Cult Web Site Hits Dublin," Business & Finance Magazine, July 1, 2004.

Galant, Richard, "Craigslist Founder Holds on Tight to His 'Inner Nerd,'" Seattle Times, February 7, 2005, p. C1.

Ganahl, Jane, "Craigslist's Craig Newmark: Web's Wonder Boy," San Francisco Chronicle, July 29, 2001, p. A1.

Howell, Donna, "Craig's Online List of Stuff Became Popular Web Job Site," Investor's Business Daily, May 25, 2000, p. 6.

Ingram, Mathew, "Craigslist Lets Users Call All Its Shots," Globe and Mail, June 7, 2007, p. B19.

Kopytoff, Verne, "Low-Key Style Suits This Dot-Com CEO," San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2006, p. F1.

— Carrie Rothburd


Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Craigslist

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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
For the 2009 "Weird Al" Yankovic song, see Craigslist (song).
Craigslist Inc.
Type Private company
Founded 1995 (incorporated 1999)
Founder(s) Craig Newmark
Headquarters San Francisco, United States[1]
Area served 570 cities in 50 countries
Key people Jim Buckmaster (CEO)
Services Web Communications
Employees 32
Website craigslist.org
Alexa rank negative increase 46 (May 2012)[2]
Type of site Classifieds, forums
Advertising None
Registration Optional
Available in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
Launched 1995
Current status Active
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in 2006

Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and currently covers 50 countries.

Contents

History

Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events.[3][4] In early 1995, he began an email distribution list to friends. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event postings.[citation needed] People trying to get technical positions filled found that the list was a good way to reach people with the skills they were looking for. This led to the addition of a category for "jobs". User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow. The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June 1995 majordomo had been installed and the mailing list "Craigslist" resumed operations. Community members started asking for a web interface. Craig registered "craigslist.org", and the web site went live in 1996.

By early 1998, Newmark still thought his career was as a software engineer ("hardcore java programmer") and that Craigslist was a cool hobby that was getting him invited to the best parties for geeks and nerds.[citation needed] In the fall of 1998, the name "List Foundation" was introduced and Craigslist started transitioning to the use of this name. In April 1999, when Newmark learned of other organizations called "List Foundation", the use of this name was dropped. Craigslist incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999.[3] Around the time of these events, Newmark realized that the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and work full-time running Craigslist. By April 2000, there were nine employees working out of Newmark's apartment in San Francisco.[5]

In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO. Buckmaster contributed the site's multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. He was promoted to CEO in November 2000.[6]

The web site expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four in 2001 and 2002 each, and 14 in 2003. On August 1, 2004, Craigslist began charging $25 to post job openings on the New York and Los Angeles pages. On the same day, a new section called "Gigs" was added, where low-cost and unpaid jobs and internships can be posted free.

Expansion to more cities

The first 14 city sites were:[7] (entire list)

Vancouver, British Columbia was the first non-U.S. city included. London was the first city outside of North America.

In November 2004, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo became the first cities outside primarily English-speaking countries.

As of May 2008, 500 "cities" in 50 countries have Craigslist sites.[7] Some Craigslist sites cover large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas—for example, the US states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Colorado Western Slope, the California Gold Country, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are among the locations with their own Craigslist sites. As of 22 December 2011 (2011 -12-22), there are 710 unique Craigslist sites that can be posted to.

Operations

Craigslist headquarters in the Sunset District of San Francisco.

The site serves over 20 billion page views per month, putting it in 37th place overall among web sites worldwide and 10th place overall among web sites in the United States (per Alexa.com on March 24, 2011), with over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010). With over 80 million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over 2 million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.[8][9] The 23 largest US Cities listed on the Craigslist home page collectively receive more than 300,000 postings per day just in the "for sale" and "housing" sections as of October, 2011.[10] The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements to personal ads.

In 2009, Craigslist operated with a staff of 28 people.[11]

Financials and ownership

In December 2006, at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wall Street analysts that Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit, instead it prefers to help users find cars, apartments, jobs, and dates.[12][13]

Craigslist's main source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities – $75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Orange County (California) and Portland, Oregon – and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad).

The company does not formally disclose financial or ownership information. Analysts and commentators have reported varying figures for its annual revenue, ranging from $10 million in 2004, $20 million in 2005, and $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007.[14][15][16]

On August 13, 2004, Newmark announced on his blog that auction giant eBay had purchased a 25% stake in the company from a former principal. Some fans of Craigslist expressed concern that this development would affect the site's longtime non-commercial nature, but it remains to be seen what ramifications the change will actually have. As of April 2012, there have been no substantive changes to the usefulness or non-advertising nature of the site—no banner ads, charges for a few services provided to businesses.

The company is believed to be owned principally by Newmark, Buckmaster, and eBay (the three board members). eBay owns approximately 25%, and Newmark is believed to own the largest stake.[7][16][17]

In April 2008, eBay announced it was suing Craigslist to "safeguard its four-year financial investment." eBay claimed that in January 2008, Craigslist executives took actions that "unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest by more than 10%."[18] In response, Craigslist filed a counter-suit against eBay in May 2008 "to remedy the substantial and ongoing harm to fair competition" that Craigslist claims is constituted by eBay's actions as Craigslist shareholders.[19]

Site characteristics

The site is notable for having undergone only minor design changes since its inception; even by 1996 standards, the design is very simple. Since 2001, the site design has remained virtually unchanged, and as of April 2010, Craigslist continues to avoid using images and uses only minimal CSS and JavaScript, a design philosophy common in the late 1990s but almost unheard of today for a major website.[citation needed]

Newmark says that Craigslist works because it gives people a voice, a sense of community trust and even intimacy. Other factors he cites are consistency of down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity. Newmark was approached with an offer for running banner ads on Craigslist, but he decided to decline. In 2002, Craigslist staff posted mock-banner ads throughout the site as an April Fools' Day joke.[20]

Languages

In March 2008, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese became the first non-English languages supported.[21]

Flagging

Craigslist has a user flagging system to quickly identify illegal and inappropriate postings. Classified ad flagging does not require account log in or registration, and can be made anonymously by any visitor.[22] When a certain number of users flag a posting, it is removed. The number of flaggings required for a posting's removal is variable and remains unknown to all but craigslist.org.[22] Items are flagged for three categories: misplaced, prohibited, or spam/overpost.[23] Although users are given a short description of each flagging category, users ultimately flag on their preference, prejudice, or misunderstanding of the Craigslist Terms of Use.[24] Flaggings can also occur as acts of disruptive vandalism and for the removal of competitors postings.[22] To better understand and clarify flagging it is up to the users to define rules themselves in such places as the Unofficial Flagging FAQ[25] and the flag help forum.[26] The Flag Help Forum is an unmoderated volunteer community, it is not staffed by Craigslist employees, and it is not affiliated with craigslist.org.[27] The forum volunteers have no access to information about craigslist.org user accounts or ads, and must rely upon information supplied by the ad poster to try and piece together the reason an ad was flagged and removed.[28] The Flag Help Forum's unmoderated format allows anyone to post anonymously and without accountability.[29] The forum's usefulness and effectiveness can be compromised by people who post malicious replies to help threads.[28]

Personals

Over the years Craigslist has become a very popular online destination for arranging for dates, and sex.[30][31][32][33][34] The personals section allows for postings that are for "strictly platonic", "dating/romance", and "casual encounters".[30][31][33][34]

The site has been found to be particularly appealing to help connect lesbians, and gay men with one another because of its free and open nature in addition to it being hard to find gay people in one's area for some.[35]

In 2005, San Francisco Craigslist's men seeking men section was attributed to facilitating sexual encounters and was the second most common correlation to syphilis infections.[35] The company has been pressured by San Francisco Department of Public Health officials leading Jim Buckmaster to state that the site has a very small staff and that the public must police themselves.[35] They have however added links to San Francisco City Clinic and STD forums.[35]

Adult services controversies and closure

Craiglist website as it appeared on September 4, 2010 with black censored box in place of Adult Services

Advertisements for "adult" (previously "erotic") services were initially given special treatment, then closed entirely on September 4, 2010, following a controversy over claims by state attorneys general that the advertisements promoted prostitution.[36][37]

In 2002, a disclaimer was put on the "men seeking men", "casual encounters", "erotic services", and "rants and raves" boards to ensure that those who clicked on these sections were over the age of 18, but no disclaimer was put on the "men seeking women", "women seeking men" or "women seeking women" boards. As a response to charges of discrimination and negative stereotyping, Buckmaster explained that the company's policy is a response to user feedback requesting the warning on the more sexually explicit sections, including "men seeking men."[38] Today, all of the above listed boards (as well as some others) have a disclaimer.

On May 13, 2009, Craigslist announced that it would close the erotic services section, replacing it with an adult services section to be reviewed by Craigslist employees. This decision came after allegations by several U.S. states that the erotic services ads were being used for prostitution.[39] Postings to the new category cost $10 and could be renewed for $5.

On September 4, 2010, Craigslist closed the adult services section of its website in the United States. The site initially replaced the adult services page link with the word "censored" in white-on-black text. The site received criticism and complaints from attorneys general that the section's ads were facilitating prostitution and child sex trafficking.[40][41]

The adult services section link was still active in countries outside of the U.S.[40] Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "Craigslist isn't legally culpable for these posts, but the public pressure has increased and Craigslist is a small company." Brian Carver, attorney and assistant professor at UC Berkeley, said that legal threats could have a chilling effect on online expression. "If you impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users do, then they're not going to take chances. It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression."[41]

On September 8, 2010, the "censored" label and its dead link to adult services were completely removed.[42][43]

Craigslist announced on September 15, 2010, that it had closed its adult services in the United States for good. However, it defended its right to carry such ads and its efforts to fight prostitution and sex trafficking. Free speech and some sex crime victim advocates criticized the removal of the section, saying that it threatened free speech and that it diminished law enforcement's ability to track criminals. However, the removal was applauded by many state attorneys general and some other groups fighting sex crimes. Craigslist said that there is some indication that those who posted ads in the adult services section are posting elsewhere. Sex ads cost $10 initially and it was estimated they would have brought in $44 million this year had they continued.[44][45] In the four months following the closure, monthly revenue from sex ads on six other sites (primarily backpage.com) increased from $2.1 to $3.1 million, partly due to price increases.[46]

On December 19, 2010, after pressure from Ottawa and several provinces, Craigslist closed 'Erotic Services' and 'Adult Gigs' from its Canadian website.[47]

Reception

In July 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Craigslist for allowing ads from dog breeders, and thereby allegedly encouraging the over breeding and irresponsible selling of pit bulls in the Bay Area.[48]

In January 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an editorial criticizing Craigslist for moving into local communities and "threatening to eviscerate" local alternative newspapers. Craigslist has been compared to Wal-Mart, a multinational corporation that some feel crushes small local businesses when they move into towns and offer a huge assortment of goods at lower prices.[49]

Nonprofit foundation

In 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation,[50] a § 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that offers free and low cost events and online resources to promote community building at all levels. It accepts charitable donations, and rather than directly funding organizations, it produces "face-to-face events and offers online resources to help grassroots organizations get off the ground and contribute real value to the community".

Since 2004, the Craigslist Foundation has hosted an annual conference called Boot Camp, an in-person event that focuses on skills for connecting, motivating and inspiring greater community involvement and impact. Boot Camp has drawn more than 10,000 people since its inception.[citation needed] The latest Boot Camp event was held on Saturday, August 14, 2010.[51]

The Craigslist Foundation is also the fiscal sponsor for Our Good Works, the organization that manages AllforGood.org, an application that distributes volunteer opportunities across the web and helps people get involved in their communities.[52]

Related media

  • In November 2007, Ryan J. Davis directed Jeffery Self's solo show My Life on the Craigslist at Off-Broadway's New World Stages.[53] The show focuses on a young man's sexual experiences on Craigslist and was so successful that it returned to New York by popular demand in February 2008.[54]
  • On June 16, 2009, "Weird Al" Yankovic released a song titled "Craigslist", which is a parody of the website, done in the style of The Doors.
  • On January 3, 2011, a movie named The Craigslist Killer premiered on Lifetime featuring the story of Philip Markoff, who was accused of robbing and/or murdering several sex workers he met through Craigslist's adult services section.
  • The premise of the sitcom New Girl centers around a girl (Zooey Deschanel) who looks on Craigslist to find new roommates. She misunderstands one of the listings and ends up moving in with three men, when she had intended to find female roommates.

See also

Portal icon San Francisco Bay Area portal
Portal icon Companies portal


References

  1. ^ "craigslist – Company Overview". Hoover's. http://www.hoovers.com/craigslist/--ID__129617--/free-co-factsheet.xhtml. Retrieved May 8, 2008. 
  2. ^ "Craigslist.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org. Retrieved 2012-05-02. 
  3. ^ a b "about > factsheet". craigslist. 2010-11-29. http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet. Retrieved 2011-07-30. 
  4. ^ "On The Record: Craig Newmark". San Francisco Chronicle. August 14, 2004. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/15/NEWMARK.TMP&ao=all. Retrieved November 15, 2011. 
  5. ^ "Archived page from Craigslist's About Us". April 19, 2000. Archived from the original on June 20, 2000. http://web.archive.org/web/20000620192058/http://craigslist.org/aboutus.html. Retrieved February 8, 2007. 
  6. ^ "Jim Buckmaster—CEO & programmer". Archived from the original on June 30, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070630145737/http://www.craigslist.org/about/management.html. Retrieved September 6, 2007. 
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  34. ^ a b Risky Sex- and Drug-Seeking in a Probability Sample of Men-for-Men Online Bulletin Board Postings, by Christian Grov
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  50. ^ Craigslist Foundation
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