Craig's World - A-list dreams

Genuinely building the online communities promised by the dotcom pioneers, 10-year-old craigslist.org is a popular online classifieds flat-hunting tool in several cities in the US and Canada, and has now expanded its service to London.

The self-proclaimed "social" listings site based in San Francisco shocked its loyal users earlier this month when a 25 per cent stake in the firm ended up in the hands of the highly corporate eBay.

vnunet.com sat down with founder, chairman and customer service representative Craig Newmark (pictured right) and chief executive officer Jim Buckmaster (left) to talk about corporate responsibility, European expansion and Londoners' apparent obsession with casual encounters.

Craigslist has had a site in London since April last year. Usually the jobs and apartments sections attract most visitors on your websites, yet your London branch seems to be doing poorly in those areas.

Craig: A number of women have used the casual encounters site for 'fun'. Talking to people about that, for the first time in my life I got to use the phrase 'randy' in its proper context.

People should use our sites as they need to. Maybe in London there are better systems for finding apartments. If so, they should use them. We are providing a common site for people to use. We're in the UK for the long run. We don't promote the site; people will find it if it's useful.

Are there other cities in Europe to follow?

Jim: The ones more likely to happen this year are Dublin, Edinburgh and Manchester. Amsterdam depends on whether we decide to go with an English-only service.

Craig: We don't know how to handle other language sites. We understand that in the UK they speak a very passable dialect of English. Our first sites in non-English speaking countries might be in English. We hear that there is a great demand for that.

Why shouldn't users feel like you sold out to a big corporate entity with the eBay deal?

Craig: We had no intention to go that route. An ex-employee decided that he wanted to sell his equity, even though we had agreed that it had no face value. And he had every right to do that.

Short term, users will notice nothing as a result of the deal. Long term, I hope that eBay will help us shut down the scam gangs in Nigeria and Romania that abuse our service to find their victims.

You claim to be profitable by charging employers in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles for job postings. But you could make more money by adding additional charges, like your new shareholder does.

Craig: We could charge for a great deal. We're not going to. We've asked our customers what we can charge for. They told us that it's okay to charge for apartment and job postings.

I could see us charging for business services, I'm pretty sure that people would approve of that. We charge the people with money, and for ads that they would have to pay for anyway.

Who cares about customer approval to charge for ads when the rent is due? Aren't you in this for the money?

Craig: Customer approval is critically important [and] that means listening to the public, not just going through the motions. The eBay thing doesn't affect that. We made sure that [eBay] believed in our philosophy as a condition to the deal.

It's hard to characterise us. We're not real commercial and we're not non-profit. We're pro social as a community service that is actively trying to help people out.

People see that we have built a culture of trust. We try to earn that trust every day by obsessing over customer service. I have personally put effort into spammers and abuse cases. Today I have been working on a spammer from New York; I'm trying to get their ISP and hosting service disconnected.

I do customer service to stay connected to my community. And it's more effective if the bad guy hears directly from me: it's my name that's on the damn thing.

If the concept of the online classified ads website is such a success, why aren't there any competitors to speak of?

Craig: It has to do with me being a nerd. I have the programming skills to make all the tasks associated with managing this easy. And I'm one persistent nerd boy. Once I commit to something, I follow through.

I wouldn't say that I'm the only man on earth who can do this. It's just a perfect storm of technology, customer service training, persistence and hiring the right guy as CEO.

I ran the thing by myself as a hobby for several years. Now we do it as a more serious entity with Jim [Buckmaster] running things.

Picture by Gene X Hwang, Orange Photography, San Francisco