Mesh07 Day 2 kicked off with a bit a little weak with the PR session with Richard Eldeman. Unless you were really into PR this one was difficult to handle.

The 2nd keynote was a big hit with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist. Working at Trader Corporation I’ve followed Craigslist for awhile so it was great to hear more information about their business. The most interesting aspect was their business philosophy. Craigslist is a unique position of many alot of money and not really needing to
create huge profits for its investors. I really admire them for them for this approach and their view Craigslist almost like a utility/service for people in many aspects of their life, from dating to finding a home, or getting a job.

Jim handled most of the questions directly but really didn’t have much information to reveal. The company still has 24 employees, with 2/3 focus on the technology and 1/3 focused on customer service. They have no sales or marketing people. Their office is in a small victorian house in San Francisco. I’d love to visit their office at some point.

In Canada they receive over 500,000 classified ads per month and the site ranks 7th in overall site traffic. Toronto is the 2nd largest Canadian Craigslist city, after Vancouver and both cities are the top 25 overall Craigslist cities. Craigslist revenue was not disclosed but Jim did mention that they are charging for job postings in 7 cities and real estate brokers in NYC. They began charging after discussing with their users in these cities and found that charging would provide a good barrier for spam or too much content. Before charging in any category they discuss the concept on the user forum for that category/region.

The singular strategy that Jim talked about was listening to users and providing services that users want. I love the concept of this but I think it might be a little mis-representative. For example Jim mentioned that users do not want video. I’m not certain this is entirely true and providing video would substancially increase the
complexity and traffic requirements of the Craigslist experience.

As a fan of Green technology I was excited to hear Jim discussing page views per kilowatt hour. Craigslist can achieve 175K per kilowatt hour, which he believed was industry leading. Craigslist currently runs on approximately 200 servers hosted at multiple locations. Overall I really found Jim’s discussion/interview to be very entertaining and it did provide alot of incite into the Craigslist business.