How does Craigslist stay in business?

Job listings are charged a fee, but other listings are free.

 

CL is awesome. Just enjoy it

 

Only in some cities, but it's enough.

 

I think they also charge for real estate listings in certain markets eg NYC. The owner has a unique business model, and it's a good one.

 

Also, fairly important - the website has zero graphics. That drops the cost of serving the page dramatically.

 

The owner is e-Bay.

 

e-bay bought 25% of the company. They don't own it or control it.

 

Eh, cost of bandwidth is negligible regardless - difference between their site and a site with a decent UI is probably a few hundred in serving costs a month at most. They make they through the $75 job listings as Yin stated.

I wish they would make improve the site once in a while though. I can think of at least 5 simple things they could do to improve the experience.

 

Meh, I guess it depends on how their bandwidth cost is structured. My point was that they don't need very much bandwidth at all with an all text site. The cost might be negligible for a small site, but on the scale of a site with an Alexa rank of 26 it makes a huge difference. I would imagine it does at least 5-10 million page views a day. I don't have the media metrics numbers to back it, I'd say that's a conservative estimate.

Look at it this way: a FerrariChat page (which is primarily a text site with a few images) is ~32KB. A Craigslist page is ~7KB. If you round down, the FC page is 4 times the size. Multiply those 5-10 million page views by 4 times the volume, and it makes a big difference.

 

ebay owns 25%. i think they purchased their stake from a former minority holding employee. revenue comes from job placement ads. last i saw, they did $19mill in revenues (very high PM) and only had 12 or so employees.

 

very true.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist

As of 2005, Craigslist operates with a staff of 19 people. Its sole 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 and Los Angeles).

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 was added called "Gigs", where low-cost and unpaid jobs and internships can be posted for free.

On August 13, 2004, Craig announced on his blog that auction giant eBay had purchased a 25% stake in the company from a former principal. Some fans of Craigslist have expressed concern that this development will affect the site's longtime non-commercial nature, but it remains to be seen what ramifications the change will actually have.

In 2006, Craigslist started to charge a $10 fee for users posting real estate listings in New York City due to a large number of real estate agents re-posting multiple times to be on the top of the list.

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I became aware of it in '99 - like most anybody else, by word-of-mouth complete with a little verbal history on the blessed owner & "paid it forward" the same way.