Craigslist.org  is our Ace of clubs. Why? Because it’s huge: traffic-wise it is number 40 in the world and #7 in terms of English language page views. It is 100% User Generated Content, serving even the tiniest market niche. It offers sites in the US (country of origin) and for selected places in the rest of the world.

Craigslist puts up cities whenever there are enough people asking it to do so. That concept has led to a total of approx. 450 cities worldwide.The story behind Craigslist is simple, yet intriguing: After moving to San Francisco, Craig Newmark decided he had to socialize a bit more. So he put up an e-mail list with events in the SF Bay area and sent it to a circle of friends who in turn forwarded it to their respective circle of friends. The list soon was called Craigslist. Formed into a regular for profit company in 1999, Craigslist has always been profitable, although it only charges for job listings in New York City, Los Angeles and the SF Bay Area and for real estate brokers in the NYC area – everything else is for free! It operates with a staff of 21 people out of San Francisco.

Craigslist is absolutely customer-centric: according to financial experts it could easily generate 20 times as much money if it were allowing ads. They don’t do it because according to CEO Jim Buckmaster, “our customers never asked for it”! Craig Newmark himself – being the chairman - works as Customer  Service Representative. He answers e-mails and talks to his customers, means: he knows his business!  CEO Jim Buckmaster’s resumée was spotted by Newmark (who doesn’t consider himself a manager) on Craigslist.

Buckmaster has the same ideas as Newmark about the business. When asked by a UBS analyst how Craigslist intended to maximize revenues his plain response was: “it doesn’t”.  Consequently, Buckmaster has been described as socialist anarchist and communist. But who cares? As long as the Craigslist users are happy, (organic) growth is guaranteed and one thing is for sure: it is hard to compete against a site that truly puts customers first, thus creating enormous loyalty.

But the sky is not always blue for Craigslist:  Just recently, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin alleged the site with not doing enough against child prostitution and abuse in an open letter. The Craigslist spokeswoman Susan Best created quite a PR-desaster by simply stating that she and Jim Buckmaster were travelling in Europe and Craig Newmark were no longer involved in the Company’s daily affairs. Well, Susan Best of course said that she never made these remarks and Newmark is still on board. The child pornography issue, however, is the downside of customer generated content: although the community (i.e. the users) are supposed to flag inappropriate content that will then be removed, this obviously often doesn’t happen at least not consequently enough. Craigslist is working together with e-bay (who owns 25% of the business due to a former employee selling its shares) to avoid spam and fraud in the real estate area. They absolutely should do all they could to avoid content regarding child pornography being posted. And this holds for the users, too: enjoying the virtue of customer generated content also bears the innate obligation to keep that content “clean”.

Enough said about that – enjoy craigslist.org – it’s available in these German cities and it’s really worth it!