Without Craigslist or eBay I doubt eWillys would exist. Therefore, I try to keep up with news about those two companies. Also, after being a co-founder of an early online bartering system we called BarterFarm back in 2000 (see logo to the right), I have followed eBay, Craigslist, and other online classified-based companies over the past decade. So, I found this article today in the Guardian very interesting. I thought maybe a few readers would be interested in this too.
I knew that eBay had managed to purchase a sizeable chunk of Craigslist back in 2004, but I didn’t know the following.
1) eBay is fighting to get a board of directors position on the Craigslist board, because they own 28% of the company.
2) To keep this from happening, Craigslist has been attempting to dilute ownership so that eBay will own less than 25% of the company, which keeps eBay from being able to demand a board seat.
3) I knew that there are only a handful of employees at Craigslist (maybe 20?), but the revenues last year for Craigslist totaled about $100m. That’s much, much higher than I expected! Given the size of their employee base, I suspect they are either contracting out a lot of services or raking in a lot of cash.
4) eBay launched Kijiji, a competing classified website which I have seen around, but never took very seriously.
I’m not saying one venture is better than the other, but eBay would eat their own children, while Craigslist is a community focused, egalitarian venture (hence the lack of ads, the lack of a national or international company sponsored search engine, etc). One is public, while the other is private. One is entrenched in the center of San Jose and Silicon Valley, while the other is situated in the heart of San Francisco. eBay only obtained ownership by purchasing private stock from an early founder or investor (I can’t remember which); this didn’t make the other owners very happy. Therefore, this relationship is destined for a rocky relationship of some kind.
