In the FT today, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, has spoken about the battle and the trappings of success that the soaraway success that the classified advertising website, credited with helping to finish off parts of the US newspaper industry, have bought him."I don’t have a yacht or a Gulfstream. I rent a house. I don't own a car, I have a bike."You have to wonder if the bike is going to be enough after Ebay started beating up on the site after it claimed that a stake it acquired from a former employee of the site is being diluted by Craigslist.If that wasn't enough Ebay has put the boot in and has launched a rival classified site.Ebay picked up a 28% stake in 2004 much to the displeasure of Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark who control the company.
In an entry posted on Craigslist's blog last month called 'Tainted Love', the San Francisco firm founded in 1995 asserted that eBay's accusations were unfounded and insisted the lawsuit came as a complete surprise."Coming from a company that views Craigslist as a prime competitor, filing suit without so much as mentioning these assertions to us beforehand seems unethical and suggests ulterior motives."Among the suggestions that Ebay has made to the duo is buy the company outright. Not a nice way to go about things, but then if you are a global internet giant like Ebay then maybe that is how you do business. Maybe it also had a motto when it started that read "do no evil" that got lost in translation and now reads "beat the crap out of them".Buckmaster seems in the FT to be appealing for a white knight to ride into town and save the plucky crew holed up at the fort."If someone wanted to come up with a dump truck and give us a lot of cash we wouldn’t say no," Buckmaster said before adding that he and Newmark have no interest in being answerable to outside shareholders.Besides outside shareholders would scratch their heads and be dumbstruck by the anti-establishment, just getting by way of doing things. I mean the site's fees are only enough to sustain and grow it and Buckmaster says they only want to be profitable so that "we don’t have to raise cash or do a stock offering". Having shareholders only seems turns you into Ebay or Google and we all know how that story pans out. But whatever happens there is nothing much that is going to stop Craigslist. It is now covering almost 50 cities with half of those outside the US and some in the UK as it makes inroads on this side of the Atlantic. It recently added Bath, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Essex, Kent and Nottingham.
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Gordon Macmillan
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Last login: 26 Nov 2009
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