Taking a Bite Out of the Papers, but Not the Big Money
By FERGUS SHEPPARD
IN AMERICA it is dubbed “the newspaper killer”. Craigslist, a website that offers classified listings mostly for free, is routinely cited as the worst-case example of new media sucking advertising revenues from the world of print.
Craigslist’s chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, must surely feel in the heart of enemy territory as he lowers his 6ft 8in frame into a sofa in The Scotsman’s canteen. The 44-year-old – whose company now runs 20 Craigslist sites in the UK – declares: “We’re not trying to conquer the world over here, any more so than we have tried in the US.”
The statistics for Craigslist, however, suggest a juggernaut bearing down at some speed. It is the seventh most popular English language website in the world, operating in 50 countries and with 15 million unique users.
Globally, Craigslist users post 16 million classified adverts a month and 750,000 job adverts. In the UK, where Craigslist runs sites in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, it racks up 15 million page views a month.
American newspapers loathe Craigslist because nearly every listing is free to post. Its revenues come from the fact that users in seven American cities pay to post job adverts, and listings for apartments in New York are also chargeable. That aside, the company boasts you can find a house, a wife and pretty well anything else for free.
Buckmaster, a graduate in medicine and classics from the University of Michigan, has scant sympathy for the American newspaper industry.
“The latest statistics show that in the US, the newspaper industry overall is twice as profitable as the average US business, something about dollars 60 billion (GBP 30.7 billion) annually across the newspaper industry. That figure is still rising, albeit more slowly than it has in the past.”
He deadpans: “The demise of the newspaper has been overstated”.
However, I counter, the listings business for Craigslist clearly has to come from somewhere.
“They are classified adverts, so there is some competition I suppose for revenue posed by sites like Craigslist,” he says. “Of course newspapers increasingly have their own classified advert websites in addition to print. We don’t have a particular ambition to reach any special market share in the UK, it’s a simple as users asked for Craigslist sites here, so we added them.”
Buckmaster is in Scotland for a question-and-answer session with students at Edinburgh University, and is flanked on the sofa by his PR, and also his partner, Susan Best, who shares his home in San Francisco. The founders of the networking website Bebo and the photo- sharing website Flickr live nearby. “It’s a bit of an internet ghetto,” he smiles.
Dressed in cord jacket, open shirt and jeans, he appears the epitome of Silicon Valley’s “corporate casual” dress code. While his answers are full and factual, he also comes across as slightly distant. The impression is underlined by the fact he doesn’t go in for much eye contact, his eyes tending to wander to some indeterminate middle point while he talks.
Buckmaster is rich – but could be far richer. The company could make vast sums by placing more advert links on its pages and marketing more to its massive database of users. Some estimates suggest the company currently earns about GBP 16 million a year in revenues, peanuts compared to the company it keeps, such as Google and MSN. Buckmaster’s refusal to make huge sums – anathema in corporate America – led Fortune magazine to ponder whether he was a communist.
When it comes to Craigslist, Buckmaster is both the boss and a believer in its for-free ethos. He joined the company in 2000 after posting his CV on Craigslist, where it was picked up by founder Craig Newmark. The interview took place on Newmark’s sofa (“It’s not surprising, because the company was in his flat at the time, where else was it going to be?”). His conversation is peppered with references to “what users have asked for” rather than Silicon Valley strategy buzzwords.
A computer programmer by trade, Buckmaster built the site into a global business that survived the dotcom slump of 2000. Its lean structure undoubtedly helped it continue growing as the internet went wildly out of fashion among investors. Privately owned and with a low staff payroll – it employs just 23 people in San Francisco – it has low overheads. Its attractiveness is such that eBay is a shareholder. Buckmaster stresses, though, that: “They don’t have any role in the day-to-day operation of the site or decision making.”
Given that Buckmaster is a phone call away from immense wealth – his company would be bought instantly – I ask what motivates him to work at least ten hours a day in the office with frequent work calls at night.
“It’s a fun job, we enjoy what we do, we make very good livings already,” he replies. “To sell the site would mean to hand it to a corporate entity to do whatever they saw fit with it.
“It would be very unlikely it would be run the way we’re happy with running it, which is… only doing what users ask for, and nothing else.”
(c) 2007 Scotsman, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.