The List Tycoon

The Sunday Age

Sunday September 26, 2004

Gerard Wright

One of the most successful ventures in the history of the internet doesn't take ads, doesn't charge for most listings and has all the design finesse of a pair of clogs - and it's just opened a Melbourne branch. Gerard Wright met Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.

If the nerd as we know it has a living template, it is Craig Newmark. Short, balding and bespectacled, with only a goatee by way of follicular compensation, this native of San Francisco is self-deprecating to a fault. When he walks down the steps of the shabby three-storey Victorian building that is the headquarters of his internet company - wearing a grey shirt over a black T-shirt, both tucked into a pair of Lee jeans with the bottoms rolled up - his feet clump noisily on the stairs inside an unfortunate pair of black, square-toed shoes. It's a fitting outfit for Newmark, the founder of the similarly modest, nondescript and yet phenomenally successful website craigslist, which this month arrived in Australia via city sites in Melbourne and Sydney.

Craigslist is an online shopping bazaar, bulletin board and soapbox - and, more significantly, one of the few manifestations so far of the web's long-heralded potential to breed virtual communities of like-minded souls. It was born in 1995 in San Francisco, the epicentre of the tech boom, and its beginnings were obscure, well-intentioned and humble.

There was no plan; there was just Craig Newmark, software engineer and internet evangelist for the stockbroking company Charles Schwab, offering a personal guide to the social, literary and culinary highlights of San Francisco to a group of friends via email (the "list" referred to both his email address book and his choices).

The list soon grew, and became a two-way thing, with recipients offering their own views, suggestions and requests. It even spread to other cities. The commercial possibilities were immediately obvious, though Newmark turned down repeated invitations to sell the site. The suggestion that he run banner ads - the internet's favoured form of advertising - was also kiboshed. "I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge," Newmark said in an interview with Wired magazine this month. "But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world."

When craigslist opened its sites for Melbourne and Sydney in the first week of September, it did so entirely without fanfare. "We don't promote sites," company CEO Jim Buckmaster says. "We leave it 100 per cent to prospective users to find it or hear about it by word of mouth."

Nor do Buckmaster and Newmark and their 14 employees place any great significance upon design. Type into your browser the address www.melbourne.craigslist.org, and there - in plain, fast-loading, circa 1995 text - is a frill-free site, its sole concession to design extravagance the occasional smiley-face emoticon.

Despite the absence of bells and whistles, craigslist.org has become one of the most popular sites in the US. The company claims that in July, the craigslist sites in the 43 cities it serves across the US racked up a staggering one billion page views, and attracted five million unique visitors. There are also sites in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and London.

Each site has a rants page, where conflicting arguments and values can butt heads, and extensive listings and classifieds. Job ads are charged at the rate of $US75 ($A107) in San Francisco and $US25 in New York and Los Angeles. Everything else - every other for-sale notice, accommodation listing, car pool offer and meeting announcement in cities from Miami to Memphis to Montreal to Melbourne - is free.

But, says Newmark, that's not the only reason craigslist has struck a chord. "The real answer is that the people who use all of our sites are the people who really run them," he says. "They post stuff, but they also flag things for possible removal (for offensive postings in the rants and raves sections, or for scams among the jobs and accommodation listings), and we're trying to turn over more control to the community. The people who use a site will determine its culture, and sometimes that surprises us. It differs from city to city, from group of people to group of people. Our challenge is to get out of the way."

The anything-goes approach has led to interesting results. Craigslist has become the ear into which the lonely pour their anguish and the randy their fantasies, in the likely knowledge that someone, somewhere will read and respond, maybe in kind, maybe not. The site is also the first and deepest resource for reality TV producers seeking "talent'', for first-time pet owners, recyclers, activists, and buyers and sellers of every stripe.

Two years ago, when the San Francisco Giants reached the baseball World Series for the first time in 13 years, a female fan bartered a pair of impossible-to-get Giants tickets, via craigslist, for a donation of non-frozen healthy sperm.

Last month, on the New Orleans site, there was this listing: "Slightly used air guitar, in great condition. My old man gave me this air guitar on my 10th birthday and it's brought me nothing but joy. Great for thrashing and wailing. Will take $5 or best offer. Price includes one set of air strings and an excellent air stand."

A contributor to a discussion forum recently wrote this: "I have made a living from craigslist, met my women on craigslist, get my laughs on craigslist and, finally, made some great friends from craigslist. God knows what my life would be like if someone had not introduced me to your site last year."

For Lee Rainie, director of the Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project, the existence and success of craigslist is a defining moment in history. "It's a big cultural moment," she says. "It's a big economic moment. I wish there were some metrics we could use to say it's less important than the bronze age but more important than the telephonic age, in terms of its impact. But no one has figured that out yet. Craigslist is one of the main places where the change is taking place and becoming visible."

This change, says Rainey, is in the way people communicate with each other, and the ways they form networks or communities. They are increasingly bypassing traditional methods of face-to-face or telephonic contact in favour of the virtual. But craigslist, Rainey says, "does it both ways. It facilitates local exchanges in the way that bazaars or fairs used to, but it also helps the formation of new communities".

Newmark knows he's helped create something special, something that harks back to the early promise of the technological revolution. "When it was just starting, before the bubble and now, people seemed to have more balanced views about the internet," he says. "Sure, we can make some money, but also the internet can change our lives. So the bubble was a distraction from changing the world, and people went a little nuts. And when it burst, a lot of people lost jobs and their homes."

For all that, he still believes the tech boom was more a power for good than ill. "A lot of technology and democratic technology got developed and deployed much faster than normally happens during peace time," the former designer of online transaction programs says. "I figure greed is a safer motivator than war."

For a long time, in San Francisco and elsewhere, it was thought that craigslist was just a domain a name, not a person. But in truth, Newmark is craigslist: a success story without ornamentation, a mogul-cum-altruist who has, mostly, been able to hide his light under a bushel. Face to face, the only trace of that illumination is in his eyes, which fairly gleam, as though privy to some massive internal joke.

His private life was exhaustively and fruitlessly researched in a recent magazine profile for the Los Angeles Times, the conclusion being that it is virtually non-existent. It is four years since he last had a holiday. He is a 51-year-old bachelor (not of the confirmed variety), whose mission in life it is to befriend every dog in his neighbourhood. (To that end, he carries a stash of dog biscuits in the satchel he carries everywhere.)

His sense of humour is dry and self-deprecating. In discussing the launch of the sites in Australia (it's their second incarnation, after a brief but failed fling in 2000), he trundles out just about every piece of mythology about the sunburnt country that Americans hold dear.

"Mostly when I was there I was concerned about how all of the wildlife can kill you, even the seagulls," he says. "I felt in some danger."

By definition, a computer nerd is one who spends a lot of time in front of the computer screen. Unusually, that screen time has been the making of Newmark. "I've become a different human being in the last few years," he says.

In what ways has the site changed him? "I really had big difficulties getting along with people, and couldn't read people at all," he says. "Now, I understand and empathise with people more." He admits, though, that "I still have problems reading them''.

Newmark claims he has gained a deeper understanding of people as a result of spending thousands of hours as a hands-off traffic cop on his site. "I guess what I mostly note is the similarity of people," he says, "because through experience we found that pretty much everyone out there is OK, and that's helped us build a culture of trust. People pretty much want to go on and give each other a break."

As a privately owned company, craigslist does not need to publish financial results. According to one estimate, its 2003 turnover - derived almost entirely from the sale of job ads in San Francisco - was $US6.7 million. A reasonable income for such a community-minded venture, but far from the big league.

In keeping with general tone of modesty about craigslist, Newmark and Buckmaster work just metres apart, with their backs to each other, in a small converted bedroom on the second floor of the company's three-storey house/office. As they spoke with Agenda, they struggled to stifle yawns; they've recently been working 60 to 70-hour weeks, and the strain is beginning to show. Newmark handles what he calls "customer service'', the endless flow of emails directed at the site or at him personally. When I fire off a query at 11.30pm on a Sunday, I receive an answer within 15 minutes.

Recently, the long nights have taken on greater urgency. This year, craigslist received notice of an incursion of sorts. A former employee and founding partner, identified by The San Francisco Chronicle as Phillip Knowlton, was negotiating to sell his 25 per cent share of the company. Last month, that share was bought by eBay, the online auction giant, for a reported $US15 million. Like it or not, craigslist was now sharing a sleeping bag with a company with a market capitalisation of $US53 billion, 5200 employees and a 2003 profit of $US442 million.

Craigslist users feared the worst, and voiced their opinions on the site. "The only site that survived the corporate bullshit is now gobbled up by yet another big corporate," wrote one. "I am a seller on eBay. I make money, this is business. No matter what eBay say, they are there to make money, not to provide a service. We get what we pay for, that's all. But craigslist has always been the place where I come every day to talk to people and exchange ideas and stuff. Now it looks like we need to look at craigslist as a commercial entity, not a community-based website."

Buckmaster and Newmark are doing their best to play down the concerns, pointing to the fact that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is a noted philanthropist. "They wanted to do the right thing for us, even though they could have just done the deal," says Newmark. eBay, he says, will respect the moral compass that has guided craigslist.

Whatever impact eBay's investment has, there's no escaping the fact that it has put a price of $US60 million on Newmark's creation - and in the traditional American business sense, that is the ultimate validation.

For now, Newmark's website exists at the crossroads of commerce and culture. It is the best address in cyberspace, though the upkeep can be exhausting.

As the interview winds up in the office of craigslist, outside the light rail rumbles past. In the 30 minutes or so that we've been speaking, another 53 emails have landed. Newmark is in demand, and so is what he has created.

"In my head, I can see that I've started something good, though my team deserves the credit," Newmark says. "But in my gut, I can only see what needs to be better."