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Comment by samson | Hacker News Reader

I'm personally not a fan of Craig Newmark.He'll wake up one day and kick himself in the ass for not doing more with craiglists.

He worries that effort to monetize the site more will be the equvilant of selling out, but the reality is that it will happen with or without his consent (my guess is without). A big player like ebay holding 25% will not lie still forever and will jump at any opportunity to acquire more interest in the company from any shareholder willing to sell out.

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you're like the wall street people he talks with. they don't get him, either. did you ever consider that maybe the reason craigslist was so successful was that it didn't have annoying banner ads or a login screen everywhere the way standard Valley dogma bullshit demands?

he DOES want to do more with craigslist. he talked about this in an interview with Charlie Rose. he said that craigslist is focused on very basic needs -- finding a job, finding a place to live, etc. he wants to extend that to bigger and better things. doing that is hard and it takes time.

There are plenty of usability improvements to the Craigslist UI that have nothing to do with adding "annoying banner ads" or a login screen. For example, suppose you're looking for apartments on Craigslist. Suppose I want to find all the apartments near a certain location. Craigslist lets me search/filter by city and by neighborhood, but that's about as granular as it goes: there's no way to say "show me apartments near address X", as far as I know.

The reflexive response to comments about Craigslist is always "you don't get the Craiglist ethos", but IMHO they aren't exactly the epitomy of good UI design, either.

"any shareholder" == Craig, you mean, since he owns the other 75%.

the employee that sold his 25% to ebay was not the only early employee of craiglists that had shares. And the only thing that has ever been publicly stated is that 25% belongs to ebay, not how much of the company Craig himself owns.

Not quite; per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist : "[Craigslist] is believed to be owned principally by Newmark, Buckmaster, and eBay (the three Board members). Ebay owns approximately 25%, and Newmark is believed to own the largest stake."

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