Craigslist President and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster isn’t nuts. He just sounds that way, particularly to anyone who thinks that the point of running a business is, you know, to make money.
And that was enough to make his appearance last week at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference feel like a dizzying trip through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.
So opens Newspaper Killer, an article by Louis Hau at Forbes.com. Hau doesn’t get the Craigslist model and demonstrates this with the final sentence of his piece.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality, already in progress.
Craigslist is profitable. That it is not making every last dollar possible does not mean it is run by lunatics. Jim Buckmaster sums the model up well:
Ours is to try to be as philanthropic in our core business as we can be and leave all the money out there in the hands of users.
We have borrowed heavily from the Craigslist model in developing Find It. Our plan is that at least 60% of our ad categories will be free and by the time we launch it may be more. Find It is a private company so growing shareholder value is not that big a deal. Our pricing aims to help our advertisers keep their prices lower.