WSJ on CraigsList and Zen of Classified Ads 278
prostoalex writes "Wall Street Journal profiles one of the Valley's most mysterious and secretive Web companies. A leader in online classifieds space and by some measures one of Web's top sites, CraigsList is ostensibly anti-ad and anti-self-promotion. From the article: "One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?""
The kind of company.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, sometimes when running a business, the best place to be is not necessarily the "biggest" and/or "most visible" place to be. Not every company dreams of or wishes to aspire to growing into some kind of huge behemoth like Wal-Mart.
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http://wi-fizzle.com [wi-fizzle.com]
Re:I Had No Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Fascinating. (Score:4, Interesting)
I love the 'give us the money instead' comment, though. I've always wondered if there would ever be a way for an Internet company to farm big corporations for real people.... At first, I thought that that was what Google ad revenue was doing.
Who is to say.... (Score:2, Interesting)
And now for a cliche-prediction-bomb: mark my words... all good things come to an end... Eventually every business capitulates to the almighty buck and CraigsList will not "buck" the trend.
Long term strategy (Score:1, Interesting)
Craigslist.org is a breeze to use and very useful. By keeping their content clean and refreshingly ad-free, they have secured themselves as the de-facto classified website on the internet.
Content is king and as far as classified ads go they are the king of content. Just you wait - Craigslist.com will sell for over one billion US (you heard it here first!).
-SmR
Re:Hey! We were gonna milk that for all its worth! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sole? Sole proprietorships and very narrowly, privately held corporations, partnerships, etc. make up a large percentage of businesses, and many of them operate in accord with interests of their owners beyond simply maximizing financial return or market value of the business.
Widely, publicly held companies whose management's sole duty is to maximize the financial return to the owners may make up most really big businesses, but they certainly aren't most businesses.
The Sound of One MBA Getting It (Score:2, Interesting)
What's so "zen" about running a company you'd prefer to use yourself, even if you're rich? The Wall Street Journal doesn't seem to understand business, and certainly shouldn't be throwing around smarty words like "zen" that they read on an old Mac [google.com], years after missing the point of Apple, too.
Re:Hey! We were gonna milk that for all its worth! (Score:3, Interesting)
the kind of company that knows it has more of a future by restraining its greed rather than by indulging it.
send an email to... (Score:2, Interesting)
I do think I need a simpler, plainer feeder; the hummingbirds check mine out, no feeding, and I have plenty in my backyard.
thanks!
Craig
Re:Returns (Score:1, Interesting)
On a side note, I LOVE Costco pizza. We buy them cooked from the consession stand in the front because they do not fit in my oven without cutting it in pieces first. An extremely large plain cheese pizza for under $9. At least 90% of the time our family has pizza, it is from there.
My wife used to work at a Sams club. I do not remember anything special about how they treated their employees there. Two things I do remember though. She said they used be lead by the managers at meetings to chant S-A-M-S Sams over and over again. I guess that was to get everyone in the Sams spirit?
The other thing I remember was the employee auctions. Once every few weeks, they would hold auctions after hours to get rid of the non sellable stuff, like demos, floor models, some returned things, and discontinued stuff. Participation was limited to the employee and spouse. We got some really good deals.
Re:People Queue For Wal-Mart, Too (Score:2, Interesting)
CostCo, on the other hand, makes the effort to keep their people around, and it shows. How many of those people looking for a Wal-Mart job will still be interested and willing when a position opens up a few months down the road? CostCo literally has a queue of people that want a CostCo job, and it always exists... Furthermore, most of the people in line already have jobs, and they're still willing to quit that one and go to CostCo and quite happily. I wouldn't be supprised to find out that many CostCo workers have previously worked at *Mart or Target or one of the other chains.
It's a question of ethics (Score:3, Interesting)
With my company (http://www.beskerming.com [beskerming.com]), we run no ads on our site, and our free mailing list [skiifwrald.com] is just that, free. There are no subscription fees, no advertising, no vendor pitches (besides our own occasional announcement), no spam, and no vendor sponsorship. It keeps our readers happy, and we have seen our influence stretch to over 400 million people via those responsible for their information and financial security, without really pimping the service to all and sundry. So long as we've keep our overheads low, it doesn't matter how many people receive our message from that service. Sure, we'd like to make more money, grow the company and all that other stuff, but it all goes back into the company - improving the services we provide our clients.
Faith in humanity keeps the list free, and it breeds some responses in kind. After the list started getting spammed with pump'n'dump scams (at least the moderator was spammed - no messages made it on the list), we sent out a simple request for recipients to review their system security and to ask anybody they had forwarded a copy of our messages to to do the same. Within 18 hours, the spam stopped. No subscriber has ever unsubscribed, and even after polling them for what they wanted to have done with the list, most responded that they enjoyed having access to a truly free list and wanted it kept that way.
We originally started the list to build credibility and reputation in the eyes of the market, and to show some of our capabilities, and even though we only recently started spreading word about it, we have attracted some quality readership who are firm supporters (at least of our free work).
Yeah, it would be easy to spam the list silly with ads, sell the subscriber list, and otherwise bleed the readership dry, but that is not ethically or morally justifiable and so long as I control the ethical path of the company, it will never happen.
One argument that is often used to support the nepotism that used to take place in large family-owned companies is that the family had a vested interest in keeping the company solvent, and knew what it took from generation to generation to support and maintain the wealth and health of the company. Never mind that by the third generation things usually went pear shaped, as that generation was far enough removed from the founders who created the wealth so as to not understand what sacrifice and effort was required for the health of the company. Basically, the ethical decisions that created and grew the company in the first place were discarded for short term enjoyment of the wealth.