When Craigslist goes to Wall Street

What happens when the chief executive of the ridiculously successful classified-ads site Craigslist, Jim Buckmaster, goes to a Wall Street conference and says that their primary (and secondary) goal is to "help Web users find jobs, cars, apartments and dates -- and not so much to make money"? A culture clash. A UBS analyst asked how they planned to maximize revenues, and Buckmaster said "that's definitely not part of the equation". The analyst asked why they don't run Google ads, and Buckmaster answered that they crunched the numbers, and they were "staggering", but still, "no users have been requesting that we run text ads, so for us, that’s the end of the story". At the end the analyst wrote a research note (summarized here) saying that he basically doesn't get the concept of serving customers first and worrying about money later (Craigslist, which with its barebones approach - see homepage at right - is stealing business from newspapers and other classified-ads operators, is basically free except for fees on job listings in seven of the many cities it serves, and apartment listings in New York - 10 USD per ad - which covers its costs). (via André)

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Advertising on Craigslist vs. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another type of marketing which many business owners find to be both worthwhile and affordable. For many the appeal of affiliate marketing is the affiliates are not compensated for their efforts unless the business owner sees some type of gain from the advertising. This gain may be in the form of website traffic in the case of pay per click marketing, in the form of sales in pay per sale marketing or in the form of potential leads when a website visitor performs a specific action such as registering with a website or signing up for an offer.

While affiliate marketing is very appealing there are others who prefer advertising on Craigslist. The advantages Craigslist offers to advertisers is, of course, that the advertisers never pay for their business advertisements and the community receives a great deal of website traffic already so driving traffic to the website is not a concern.