Craiglist Founder
Craig Newmark
Craig Alexander Newmark provided a whole new dimension to the internet advertising.
His Well Known creation – Craiglist – is a website
that provides free online classified advertisement listing of products and services
around the world along with job postings and discussion Forums. Started in 1995,
the site has made innumerable rounds in news this year with its ever increasing
popularity. Now with over twenty billion page views per month the site has successfully
made its place in the top 50 sites on the web.
As per biography of Craig Newmark he was born
in Morristown (6 December 1952), New Jersey and graduated from Morristown High School
in 1971. Upon graduation, he attended college at Case Western Reserve University,
where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1975 and Master of Science degree in
1977. He was immediately offered a job at IBM. Personal computing was still in its
infancy and IBM's mainframes were the standard equipment in business and industry.
After IBM, he took up with the investment bank Charles Schwab in San Francisco.
Craig says, "I was looking a lot at the net for Schwab, seeing a lot of people helping
each other out. In early '95 I decided that I should do something, so I started
emailing friends about cool events in San Francisco. People asked for more, like
job and apartment postings and the list grew via word of mouth."
Craig Newmark soon realised he was onto something.
He wanted to call the site ‘sf-events’ but his PR-savvy friends suggested calling
it ‘craigslist’ to reinforce its personal and
down-to-earth nature. Gradually, through some combination of the crude utility of
its design, the frankness and wit that characterised its postings and the all-encompassing
scope of its ad departments and discussion groups, it became more than that, encouraging
a unique sense of community, trust and loyalty in its users. As sites were introduced
to other US cities - first Boston, then Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and later
another 196 cities throughout the country - Craigslist slowly became embedded in
the public imagination.
Craiglist employs just 25 people, spends no money
on ads, relies on word of mouth and has been profitable since 1999. Craigslist doesn’t
disclose how much money it makes, but industry estimates put expected revenues for
2009 at around $100m (£61m) and costs at no more than $6m. The site’s devoted users
provide all the content for free. Craigslist doesn’t follow the common dot-com company
practice of dumping truckloads of new features on a site to impress investors and
wow users because Newmark says "We're driven by community needs, which has to do
with effectiveness and speed."
In the US, newspapers earn over a third of their revenues from classified ads. Nationwide
classified revenues continue to grow, albeit slowly, but in cities where
Craigslist is well established, the website is burning up the market.
Classified Intelligence Report, an industry newsletter, found that in San Francisco
the main newspapers lost over $75m in classified revenues in 2004 because of the
Craigslist effect.
In 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation, a non-profit organization
that connects people to the resources they need to strengthen communities and neighbourhoods.
It 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. The latest Boot
Camp event was held on Saturday, August 14, 2010. 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. This is short biography
of Craig Newmark.
