3:30 P.M. EST 
MODERATOR: All right, well, thank you everyone. This might be the time to turn off cell phones and pagers to silent.
Thanks to everyone for coming today and for those of you who were here in January of last year, a year and a half has passed since we had Craig Newmark with us, the founder of Craigslist. And for those who did not get to hear Mr. Newmark's briefing, he is here today to review some of that information, but also take a somewhat different tact too, and speak about some of the -- well, social issues that you're involved with as well. So with that in mind, Mr. Newmark, please.
MR. NEWMARK: Hey folks, I'm at your disposal. Whatever you're in the mood to talk about is just fine with me. I have a feeling most of you live in New York or nearby. You may have seen our site. We do help with basics of everyday life; things like getting a job or a place to live -- things like getting a job or maybe finding a place to live. And the press has been very kind to us talking about the surprise, let's say, people on Wall Street have when we talk about our business model, which is to say, well, when people ask my CEO, Jim Buckmaster, how we intend to make more money out of the site, our answer is that we don't care to.
Our site, what we charge for about one percent of what's on the site, we could charge and make far more money, but we don't care. It's not altruistic or noble. We just understand what our values are about. And I joke about being a computer nerd. But the deal is that nerd values suggest that once you make enough money to make a good living and then prepare for your future, it's more fun to change things.
And so maybe we've had a modest effect, hard to say sometimes, but we just keep plugging away. We just keep trying to do things. Me -- my full-time role at Craigslist is now customer service. So for example, if you have a problem, say, with an apartment broker here -- and literally I do mean you, if you have a problem, if somebody posts an ad on our site and there's something wrong with it, maybe it involves bait-and-switch, if you send it to me, normally I'll handle it. If I'm rushed for time, I may delegate it. But that's how we work.
So about an hour ago, I was doing customer service. I was caught up then. Now I'm falling behind because even when I travel like this, I still am obliged to keep -- to keep up to date with my work.
Craigslist itself is expanding internationally. We are now in about 450 cities in 50 countries. But you may observe that just like my last time here, we still haven't done multiple language support. We're behind in that regard, so perhaps we -- perhaps we serve English-speaking expatriates better than others in a number of these countries. This is something we want to do, but we're challenged to keep up with our expansion.
For example, we're now getting well over seven billion pages per month; that's seven billion with a B. We're getting -- depending on whose estimate you read, we're getting over 20 million unique visitors per month which is pretty good because you look at our site and then you try to get something done that's useful and then you go to some other site which is more entertaining.
As an aside, I'll mention that if you have any other questions, want to confirm anything, or whatever, just e-mail me. And my e-mail address really is craig@craigslist.org. For real, I made a mistake of mentioning that on national TV last year, "The View," and by the time I got back to the hotel, I had 250 e-mails with another 100 coming in and I answered them all at some risk to my sanity, although it was more frightening that I was sitting next to Star Jones, which was definitely scary.
But I -- so this is the kind of stuff we do. Our site speaks for itself and I can go on and on about that. But we're just trying to figure out more about what we are about, why we're successful, and only recently have we been able to figure out that there are some obvious business reasons why we've, you know, done reasonably well. We have the first mover advantage. We are among the very first people doing online classifieds. And since most of our site is free, well, that helps, and we're pretty simple.
But doing customer service, and now I've been doing it 12 years one way or the other, I can see that somehow, we've built this culture of trust and as far as we can tell, we've built it without cautious intent. What we've done is just treated other people like we want to be treated which means, in part, providing good customer service. It means trusting our communities since, as odd as it sounds, we're finding that people are overwhelmingly trustworthy, and people are pretty good. There are bad guys out there, and we do get -- we do hear about them, but there's not that many bad guys out there. They make a lot of noise, but people are okay. And so we trust our community to help us police our site, and while that's not perfect, it works. It's genuinely democratic, which any kind of democracy has its flaws, but it still works fairly well. So again, the big lesson for Craigslist is simply, we've learned the obvious; simply, that if you treat other people like you want to be treated, that works.
Going on to something personal, you may have noticed that I'm having my own misadventures in other areas. For example, I'm doing some things with new forms of journalism. Specifically, I'm helping people who really are doing good work with new forms of journalism. In my own very minor way, I'm trying to promote the efforts of people who are changing journalism, many of whom are here in New York, and I'm pushing that ahead. I'm having very small experiments in public diplomacy, which will, no doubt, get me in enormous amounts of trouble. But I'll just plug away and see what happens there.
I enjoy the sound of my own voice, so I can go on indefinitely. I'll try to spare you that, so why don't you ask me what you're interested in.
MODERATOR: And when you do ask, please cite your name and your media affiliation, too, if you would please. Thank you. Craig, you can call on people if you like.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.) You mentioned online advertising. I think those of us who are in print journalism, we are doing things which we hope (inaudible) Euros or whatever monies coming into our newspapers because of advertising or lack of. What are your thoughts as far as the relationship between online advertising, journalism, the same -- in what you do?
MR. NEWMARK: I can only address the matter of classifieds since I'm pretty thoroughly embroiled in that issue. And I only know the U.S. market. But I've now spoken to a lot of people, a lot of publishers, and also a lot of industry analysts. And they do say that a lot of classifieds revenue is now leaving U.S. newspapers, but it's largely because of the effects like the more aggressive sites and niche classified papers like Order Trader or Monster who aggressively go after the most profitable areas for U.S. newspaper classifieds. That's jobs and car ads, if I'm not mistaken.
We do have an affect on the newspapers. It's a minor one, but for some reason, there's the idea that we play a much bigger role in that than we do. Newspapers in the U.S. also have bigger issues. A lot of newspapers are in chains where they're trying to get profit margins of anywhere from 10 to 30 percent. And that means that there's a lot of pressure from Wall Street on those newspapers and as a result, they do cost-cutting in areas like investigative reporting, which is hurting our country because we need more investigative reporters to ask difficult questions.
As a result of the lack of asking tough questions, trust in American media has diminished. This is pretty well reported. And a recent study says that the only way for newspapers to make more money again is to report in better quality ways and actually, that leads to more people reading the paper.
There's other issues, too. In the U.S., newspapers are migrating to the web at an increasing rate. Paper is just too expensive a medium. I'm quite fond of paper and I read at least one paper every day, and I read about one book every week, more or less. So paper I think is important, but again, it's expensive to print and it's expensive to deliver.
Flipping things a bit, you may have seen that I've engaged in some misadventures with new kinds of media, and especially with regards to some things going on in New York. At NYU, Jay Rosen has a new assignment on that. Its mission is to find new ways to pay for investigative reporting. Down in Soho, also there's Day Life, a new news aggregator where I've made, actually, a microscopic investment. If you ever hear me talking about investment, the amount of money involved is very close to zero. It's only symbolic.
There are other things going on too. There's Sun Life Foundation, which is helping reporters look more at what's happening in Washington. It's a transparency movement. There's others, something called News Trust, which tries better to find news that people might regard as more trustworthy than other reporting.
There's a lot of these things going on. My efforts are mostly -- well, I'm very much of how unaware I am of what really happens in the news industry. So what I do is I speak to people who know a lot more than I do and then I talk to them about their efforts and maybe I help their efforts. I talk with Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia because I feel Wikipedia is far more important than Craigslist. Craigslist is for the moment, but Wikipedia, I feel, is for the ages since it used to be that the guys who won wars got to write the history books. Now it's Wikipedia and sites like that. There are problems with, say, disinformation, but Jimmy is working hard on solving those. It'll take years, but that's genuinely happening.
Part of my hidden agenda in this is that I know maybe too much about American culture, particularly pop culture. But the more I read, the more I realize I don't know much about what's going on in the world. I get little bits and pieces. I read and sometimes I learn things. I now know a fair amount about the fall of the Roman republic which doesn't help anything that's happening now except very indirectly.
Let's see. I think you were -- okay. Can everyone hear me okay? I don't know if I'm using the micro -- okay.
QUESTION: Jose De Haro with Economist Financial Daily Newspaper. I have two questions. The first one, has your company been seduced by private equity or hedge funds?
MR. NEWMARK: One at a time. We're a completely privately owned company. What happened was that at one point, I gave away some equity, some shares to a -- who is now a former employee. My reasoning is that, well, we're a community service, but we have something growing increasingly valuable right now. And I was worried that I might go middle-age crazy at some point and try to sell the company for lots of money. So I gave away some equity.
But you know, I've never really been very tempted, but the former employee did sell his shares to eBay. eBay is good because they share a similar value system to us. That's okay. But meanwhile, people approach us and still suggesting we might want to sell some or all the company. The answer is no. That's just the way we -- again, it is not noble nor altruistic. It just feels right. Jim, who runs the company, and I are both engineers which -- you know, there's no MBAs in our company, so we do think differently than most.
QUESTION: And talking about the media, could we see in the future an engagement or an alliance between a big media group and Craigslist as we see -- as we saw with Yahoo! and some newspapers here in the states?
MR. NEWMARK: I don't think we're going to see any alliances between media and Craigslist itself. Right now, the efforts of journalism, again, are things that I'm doing myself, not with Craigslist, so I don't think you'll see any of those kinds of relationships. Maybe in the future we will find some way to, let's say, link to some source of trusted news for a given city. Maybe that'll happen someday, but that's purely speculative and again, right now -- well, again, it's just me trying to act as a person of goodwill seeing that in the U.S., we do need, in particular, people speaking truth to power. That's a traditional role of the press. It has a long tradition in New York starting, I think, in the early 1600s when the first printing presses arrived. So at some point, ask me who invented the Internet.
Oh, I think someone in the back asked first. You're next.
QUESTION: Hi, I'm Sebastian Heinzel from Profil Magazine from Austria. Also, two questions. How many people are working in your company?
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. One at a time, then, because I have trouble remembering. Okay, okay. There's 23 of us; 13 people in technology, programming, systems administration. The rest are pretty much in one form or the other of customer service, actually handling problems or sometimes just doing accounting or billing for the small portion of the site we charge for. Again, that's like one percent. We are hiring a little more, but mostly open-source programming.
QUESTION: And how did you get the ball rolling initially in retrospect so that you got many users? Because you have the problem of -- you don't get classifieds if there are no users and there's no users if you don't have classifieds.
MR. NEWMARK: Our -- yeah, our history is all completely a happy accident. I'm not an entrepreneur, not really. I'm a programmer. And if you know the -- again, the nerd cliché out of the U.S., I really did wear a plastic pocket protector. I really did have thick black glasses taped together. And I showed off in class, which I think is a mistake universally, but someone here may tell me later.
But the idea is I just -- see, in '94, I was at the -- at Charles Schwab, which is a discount stockbroker. I saw a lot of people helping each other out on the net, even back then. And I thought I should do some of that, so in early '95, I told people about arts and technology events in San Francisco. Then after that, people suggested things to me, like job ads or whatever, and I did that. People suggested more and I did that and that's how we operate to this very day. We don't advertise. We rely on word of mouth and sometimes the kindness of the press. But that's about it. It has been accidental entrepreneurship and somehow -- it somehow works.
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Jean Claude Movodo. I'm from ICI, Cameroon in Africa. I have one question in three step. My question is to know if you also work with African cities and countries. If yes, which one and why? If not, why? And is it possible that one day, you will have a kind of Craigslist Africa? Thank you.
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. We are in a number of cities in Africa. I don't recall what they are. The reason I won't recall about something is if -- I tend to handle problems and I haven't seen any problems coming from the African cities we support. We can take a quick look at the site because if you look at the right-hand side of our homepage, you'll see countries and cities listed there.
The way we go into a new city is that people ask us to put up a Craigslist in their city and what happens in practice is that when Jim -- again, Jim's our CEO -- when he's in the mood -- seriously, when he's in the mood, he'll look at recent requests and he'll start thinking about them and looking at internet usage in those cities and then, when he's in the mood later, he'll then fire off a batch of new cities.
He did about 100 or 150 new cities several months ago, so it'll probably be a while before more are added, but we actually pay attention to what people are saying. On the other hand, we only try to go where we're welcome because we want to be, I guess, good guests.
I'm not sure who was next; maybe -- maybe that guy there. He's already got his pen up, so --
QUESTION: Andrew Clark from The Guardian. I was just wondering whether you're tempted to expand your franchise beyond Craigslist. You've become quite a well-known brand, if you like. So are there any other things that you could attach the word Craig to, do you think?
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. Expanding beyond Craigslist itself, right now, no plans along those lines. We're not thinking about it because right now, we do pretty much one thing and we do it really well and we don't want to screw that up. So we don't even really seriously talk about it. Although The Guardian does seem to be doing some really good new things about new forms of journalism and I think Jeff Jarvis, who runs buzzmachine.com, is involved with that as well as The New York Times.
QUESTION: My name is Eiko Teshirogi. I'm writing for Japanese media, and I am a kind of frequent user with Craigslist in many ways, and I have two questions. And since you started Craigslist and -- how users attitude have been changed and also --
MR. NEWMARK: Okay, one at a --
QUESTION: Okay.
MR. NEWMARK: How have the attitudes of people changed? I don't think it's changed at all. People just want to get something everyday done because, you know, at some point, we all need to find a place to live or a job, maybe that you want to sell a sofa or get a date. And I really don't think over 12 years, much in terms of attitudes have changed, not really at all.
Maybe over time, we've attracted more people who want attention and who are sometimes obnoxious about getting that attention, but that's just life. And at times, I have to go in and break up fights. If you go back and work on newspapers and if you work on your own discussion boards, you may have that pleasure as well.
QUESTION: And next question is what percentage of the postings that have problems with that -- inappropriate posting and censoring?
MR. NEWMARK: What proportion of postings are problematic, that are somehow wrong in some sense? We don't really know. Aside from spam, because bad guys try to spam our site, I would guess that the proportion is less than five percent, but we don't really know because that would involve an extensive study, and that would be a distraction from just doing our everyday work. And once we learned about it, it might not do us any good. You'll notice, for example that, well, we don't bug people's surveys. We don't really know what our demographics are. We're a little bit curious, but being a little bit curious doesn't justify actual studies.
QUESTION: Okay. The last question is that -- what things are typical and inappropriate postings?
MR. NEWMARK: Boy, I don't know if there is typical and appropriate. Sometimes people try to run a scam of some sort. For example, they try to sell consumer electronics that doesn't exist. Sometimes they'll try to buy something with a fake cashier's check. In New York here, sometimes an apartment broker will try to rent out an apartment saying, hey, there's no fee or commission on this, whereas there is actually a very large commission or a fee. To that end, we're now working with the Department of Consumer Affairs here and they've actually issued their first wave of subpoenas. They're starting to go after the bad guys. Yeah. And unfortunately, I've specialized in problems, and it can take a lot out of you. I've been doing it too long.
QUESTION: I noticed that you spoke about political problems in this country increasingly in the last month. So I wondered if you were interested in sort of like, opening up that dialogue which you began on Craigslist. Number two, if what you --
MR. NEWMARK: One at a time.
QUESTION: Okay. It's an additional one.
MODERATOR: Go ahead.
MR. NEWMARK: In terms of Craigslist as a company, we don't care. We do provide a -- two areas -- at least two where people can comment on politics in different forms, both in our ads and also in our discussion boards. And sometimes, some of the discussions turn into arguments, but as long as people are being honest with each other, that's okay. As for me, I'm out of my depth in politics. I do think it's important in politics, well, to -- as Americans, we need to remind ourselves of what our country stands for. you know, which includes things like giving another person a break. It means giving other people opportunity. We need to remind ourselves of those values no matter what other distractions we might see, and that's an interest I have in politics.
But also in terms of journalism, I have gotten involved with people called the Sunlight Foundation. Their mission is to provide greater transparency in government. For example, they're trying to create tools which show how money flows in Washington and that's, I think, important. I think some of the folks in Britain have picked up on that. Some of the folks in the conservative party are getting very interested in that kind of thing, but again, I'm out of my depth there, although I know a lot about 1660s London, but much less about modern-day London.
Someone needs to ask me again who invented the Internet, but later.
QUESTION: I think you answered that once, right?
MR. NEWMARK: You may have seen me commenting on it.
QUESTION: It's a German, right?
MR. NEWMARK: I'm glad you asked. See, my -- one of my current themes is that -- trying to think about social media and how people affect change. I realize that from my point of view, the Internet was invented about 550 years ago by this guy, Johannes Gutenberg, but that technology languished. It wasn't used very much until a blogger named Martin Luther. What he did is he used the printing press to create what in my industry we would call the first killer app for the Internet, which was the Reformation.
And I can go on and on about this talking about bloggers like John Lachenbritten (ph) or Thomas Paine in the U.S., because I do think that what we're talking about right now -- and in fact, everyone in this room, we're involved in a historic period relating to the first uses of the printing press to cause social change. We're part of that right now and I have a feeling we're in the middle of a tipping point that'll go for a couple of years where things really change. I won't predict how that's going because I only get in trouble when I predict things.
For example, I'm still wondering where my jet pack is and what about colonies on the moon? I'm still waiting. But we are in the middle of something big and something that's happening right now. I will mention that down the street in Soho, there are some people pioneering other new forms of journalism using blogging like the Huffington Post or the Gawker people or the media-distro people. These people are in your neighborhood and they are doing important work. We won't know how important for another five or ten years. But something is happening now and while I don't visibly ever manifest excitement, I am excited about what they're doing. If I do show any signs of excitement, please tell me and I'll stop.
You had another question, didn't you?
QUESTION: Well, actually, I was going in this direction. I just wonder, what do you think about what right now happens with the elections? You know, that all these candidates use the Internet or MySpace, YouTube, all these traditional, if you will, internet channels? You approve -- I mean, do you think it's helpful or it's sort of like distorting?
MR. NEWMARK: I think what's going on in blogs in the net, it's going to be -- that's all going to be very helpful in a number of different ways. People are organizing, getting interested in politics, people who have never been interested before. That includes -- that includes me. People of all political persuasions are working together to make things happen and to care about what's going on in the world. People are using the internet for fundraising. People are using the internet -- well, both to spread rumors, but also to dispel rumors. All the above is happening and so it's a chaotic period right now. But I think what's coming out of it is a greatly -- a greatly strengthened democracy.
Looking at the Roman Republic, well, our country today has a lot in common with the Roman Republic; a Senate and a popular assembly, things -- an Executive Branch and so on. One thing that Rome didn't have that we have is the internet, which allows ordinary people to have a voice in democracy. I can go on and on about that, but again, I'll stop there.
QUESTION: Prakash Swami from Industrial Economist India. Do you think that the internet will see the end of the print medium and second, maybe the --
MR. NEWMARK: The internet ending print? I don't think so, but again, since paper is so expensive, we'll see much more online, particularly on mobile devices, and then less on paper. But, of course, something you -- any of us might do is we might see -- let's say in a few years in the morning, instead of getting the paper delivered to our house, our system may have accumulated the news that we'd like to read, plus maybe a few surprises. And it may just accumulate that news and then print out our own newspaper, which will be much smaller, and then we take that to the coffeehouse to read. That's one possibility there.
We're also, by the way, beginning to see real electronic ink or electronic paper. There's different terms, but the vision of some is that you might have a cell phone or some other device where you scroll out a computer display. It has a cellular connection so that your news is being updated on that and you may unscroll this and read the news on this electron -- what feels like an electronic piece of paper. There's a subsidiary of Philips which is supposed to be shipping products based on that later this year, and there's also a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, which is doing some of the same, but I don't think they're as ahead. Again, the idea is that it's a computer display like an LCD, but it's flexible so you can roll it up and take that with you. That will change the nature of news delivery.
MODERATOR: Do you have a second follow-up question on that?
QUESTION: With the large English-speaking population, do you plan to target the Asian market?
MR. NEWMARK: We don't plan to take it to any market in any conventional business sense. We provide a resource for people, a nice simple platform, and then see what happens. The missing part in what we're doing, again, is multiple language support. We haven't done that yet. We need to. And then over time, we have to provide the translations needed to make it easy for people to use. And again, we only want to do this if it's welcome, because otherwise, it would be kind of rude. And we're just moving very slowly in that regard. People are asking us throughout the world fairly frequently, but we want to try to do it -- well, no, we are doing it in a way that feels right to us.
MODERATOR: Okay, you have a question here.
QUESTION: Sean O'Driscoll, Irish Times. Craig, I see that the Chinese Government is cracking down now on internet cafe shops and that kind of thing, and I also see that Google and Yahoo! have been criticized for self-censorship in China and other countries. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. You mentioned the democracy of the internet, but how do you balance that against the world's dictatorships?
MR. NEWMARK: Well, it's a long story. As regarding Craigslist, we haven't had any interaction, no effect that we can tell so far. Things might have happened, but we don't know about them.
In general, and I've been thinking a lot about the Google-China situation, I do believe strongly that censorship is a bad idea, but again, I'm very much aware of how ignorant I am regarding what people in the world really want and what's good for people. So when it comes to China, several months ago, there was an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine saying that -- well, what people in China really wanted, what moves people ahead is education, and that maybe a censored Google is better than no Google at all. So I do trust Larry and Sergey and the others at Google. I wish I could tell them apart because I keep forgetting who's who and I've embarrassed myself. Honestly, I actually have embarrassed myself.
But the idea is that I do have certain beliefs, certain values, and yet I realize that sometimes, I'm very wrong. Part of that which has helped me realize that is that I read a book by -- I think it was the one by Farid Zacharia from Newsweek who points out that -- let's say a true democracy involves a lot more than just voting; it means doing what's right for the people in a particular place. And that book has, again, helped me understand how little I know. I think he's coming out with a new book and I'll probably have to get that one too.
QUESTION: Over the past 12 years, have there been attempts to hold Craigslist responsible for the content -- I don't know, child pornography or something? And how do you protect yourself?
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. In the past 12 years, there's only been one serious attempt to hold us responsible for what people put on our site, and that involves a case in Chicago citing discriminatory postings by other people. Discriminatory postings and their vision includes, let's say, an ad where it says that there's a church around the corner from this apartment and so on Sunday mornings, parking will be very difficult. So we're a little bit confused about this. We're confused also because the same principles aren't attempted, say, at the phone company because let's suppose someone says something wrong on the phone, no one holds the phone company responsible.
So in terms of honest attempts, there haven't been any. The ideas, as in the U.S. -- there actually is a good law which holds the providers of a platform, dare they protect sites like ours, against people who are trying to attack us for that reason. There are people who try all sorts of things at times; the operative phrase possibly being no good deed goes unpunished. And that may be what's happening to us. But we have people who are willing to help us out. We actually get a lot of pro bono help because even a lot of lawyers see that we're the good guys and they want to help us and that helps a lot.
MODERATOR: I believe we have a question from Washington. Okay, thank you. Washington, please go ahead.
QUESTION: Yes, hi. My name is Joyce Carol, Al Hayat newspaper. I'm a big fan of your Craigslist.
MR. NEWMARK: Thank you.
QUESTION: Just wanted to ask, I'm curious, how many hours do you work a day, a week?
MR. NEWMARK: I don't know how many. I work a very irregular 14-by-7 schedule. I don't work 14 hours every day. It's just that I'm around and available all that time and I'll take a lot of time off in there and I'll do errands or just read or something. But I probably put -- I'm guessing I would put in around 50 hours a week. That's 5-0. Frankly, I'm hoping to go to half-time customer service this year because I have been doing full-time customer service for seven years or more and I do need a break.
But even right now, between this event and the event I'm going to after, boy, between those two efforts, I'm going to be off-line for three or four hours and I've already made arrangements for someone to cover for me. I rarely get any emergencies, but once in a while, we do.
MODERATOR: Thanks. Okay, do you have a question here?
QUESTION: Hi, I'm with the U.S. Mission to the UN, and I was just curious about, even though this isn't a part of the Craigslist thing, but when you talked about public diplomacy, what your thoughts were on what you're doing off-line on that.
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. The idea is that I've been approached by people in philanthropy and in a number of areas and I really don't know what I'm doing. But for a short amount of time in my life, people will listen to what I'm saying, so in a number of areas, I'm willing to speak up promoting the good efforts of other people. And I've been doing that in my neighborhood where, for example, there are a number of people from different countries who tell me stories about what's going on in the world different than what I've heard. And so I've been speaking up about that in small ways.
But in addition, just, for example, a couple of weeks ago at a Microsoft event, I met a guy who, turns out, is the head of the Millennium Development goals operation for the UN. I met with him on Friday and we just started to talk about what this means in terms of what's going on. I've contributed to Microfinance groups, particularly Kiva and Shurush, and there, the idea is that, again, speaking as an engineer, a guy who's kind of impatient, what can do some really -- some good for people. And the Microfinance stuff like that, which Muhammad Yunus is behind, well, I'm thinking that if you give a guy a loan someplace, even in a war-torn area, that means that he's going to be running a business and maybe hiring people, and that does some real identifiable good for the world; that ain't bad.
So I'm exploring these areas. I have to do more with Kiva. I'm frustrated in that I wanted to contribute to some efforts, well, let's say, in the West Bank. But the fighting there is so bad that people aren't taking loans right now. But as soon as things settle down, I really want to be helping there. The idea is that as I'm trying these things, I'm beginning to realize that -- well, 50 years ago, the U.S. had this Marshall Plan and that was a big deal. I figure maybe what I'm building right now is my own little Marshall Plan which will help people in different places, including the U.S., because people in the U.S. need Micro-finance as well.
So again, I don't know what I'm doing. I solicit advice from people. Possibly, if I were to encounter a whole bunch of people from different parts of the world, say in a room on 52nd Street, I might ask them for help.
MODERATOR: Thank you. I think we have another question from Washington. Please go ahead. You need to press the mike button again, please. The red light should be off. Press it until the red light is off.
QUESTION: Now can you hear me?
MODERATOR: Yes, thank you.
QUESTION: Okay. My name is Sahr Kundy (ph). I'm working for Pentam (ph) News Services, the Spanish International news wire. I would like to know, in order to explain your success (inaudible) marketing company, and if you would be interested in doing one or something.
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. Our success, I think, again, in the business terms, has to do with providing a very simple but effective service. It's a largely free service, which doesn't hurt, and it didn't hurt that we were the first movers in the space of online classifieds, as far as we know; if not first, very early.
And again, culturally speaking, and I've been trying to think about this a lot, we have built a culture of trust by just trying really hard to do the right thing, whatever that means, and again, to -- yeah, to follow through with our values, with our moral compass, if that makes any sense, and somehow, that seems to work. We're just trying to do the -- again, trying to do the right thing and then following through. It's the following through that's the hard part. A lot of people start with good intentions and forget, but we keep trying to do so.
MODERATOR: Thank you. I think we have a question back here.
QUESTION: I'm Nikolai Iten (ph) with Lizzeco (ph). Do you think you can afford going on developing without raising money from your investors? Will you do that eventually?
MR. NEWMARK: We are not interested in raising money from investors. We are not even interested in taking loans or anything like that. Again, Jim Buckmaster has done a really good job of running our company. We run with relatively few expenses, so we do okay and so we don't want investment money. It's a two-edged sword. Sometimes, you need that to get going and sometimes, people take investment money, they cross through the venture capitalists, they make connections which help them succeed. That worked for eBay. eBay took investors' money, but I think they put it in the bank and never used it. But what was valuable for them were the business relationships they formed through Silicon Valley.
MODERATOR: Other questions? Do you have one back there, Mona? Please.
QUESTION: I'm going to put you a little bit on the spot here. I'm Mona from Voice of America. We spoke earlier. I just had a question because you mentioned that, you know, you have a platform right now; people are listening to you, sort of your 15 minutes of fame, so to speak.
But you also mention people like Martin Luther and John Locke and Thomas Paine that are, you know, real reformists and pioneers. Do you -- and you're very humbling and you're talking about how, you know, you never had a business model, your business model is no business model, but yet you're doing all these community efforts and, you know, promoting journalism and peace in the Middle East and -- do you see yourself as a reformer?
MR. NEWMARK: I don't think of myself as a reformer because, you know, there's a lot of people in the past and in the world today who are much bigger deals than I am, people who are really making things happen. I've decided that the contributions I'll make, aside from Craigslist, will be to find a very small number of really good efforts and then talking about them once in a while.
If you look at my blog, that's cnewmark.com, and you'll see me promoting the efforts of people who are doing really good stuff. You'll also see me indulging my sense of humor, but that's a whole different thing. So you will -- that's it right there. I -- yeah, I'll push the -- well, even this week -- for example, last week I met with people for Computers for Youth. They operate in this city primarily. They get used computers from businesses and then they give them to sixth graders and their parents, and they get the parents to commit helping them. That kind of thing is very simple, but effective.
Just before I came here, I went to a program called Year Up. They're down in the financial district. What they're doing is they're training really young people, like early 20s, typically. These are people who may have dropped out of high school, they may have spent some time in the legal system. They're training them to become genuine professionals in terms of computer systems support. And then they're getting them placed at financial firms downtown like Merrill Lynch, for example. So these are programs which are very modest, but they're getting real results, and these are the people who are really getting things done. And I figure if I can make some useful noise about that, that's my contribution. Other than that, I just like to take frequent naps, and maybe -- yeah, and either I'm reading or watching TV or I'm hanging out in my favorite coffeehouse back in San Francisco or, for that matter, hanging out in a coffeehouse here.
QUESTION: Hi. Lara Bonilla from Avui newspaper from Barcelona. I'm not familiar with the economical aspects or with the business aspects from Craigslist. So if I'm not wrong, you change for your postings and other listings. Would you explain as how?
MR. NEWMARK: Okay. The idea is our business model, such as it is, the principle -- in 2000 or so, I asked a lot of people, what's the right way to pay the bills and maybe do a little better than that. They said we should charge people -- well, we should basically charge people who are already paying too much money for less effective ads and the only consensus was it would be okay for us to charge employers and recruiters for job ads, and it would be okay if we charged real estate agents and apartment brokers for their listings. So today, we charge for job ads in seven cities. We charge in New York, for example, and we charge way under market. We're charging 25 bucks per -- an ad and in New York alone, we charge apartment brokers for ads and they asked us to charge them. It's only 10 bucks an ad, again far below market rates.
The funny thing there is the apartment brokers asked us to charge them. They felt it would cut down on the perceived need to post an ad and then post it again and it also got rid of certain kinds of scammers. So that's our whole economic model right there. We don't talk about revenue details or anything like that and I'm embarrassed to say I have no idea what our current numbers are because once in a while, I'll ask Mabel who runs our finances -- I'll ask Mabel how are we doing, and then I'll forget about it for another several months. So I know we're doing okay, but not crazy-okay. Yeah, I've warned friends that if I, at some point, grow a comb-over kind of hair and if I start putting my name on buildings, that's not a good thing.
MODERATOR: Okay, we have one more question over here from Nicolaus.
QUESTION: How much money do you make personally? How much money do you make personally per year?
MR. NEWMARK: Well, we just don't talk about how much money we make, and I don't quite know yet and that -- this -- whenever someone asks me that, I remember that I have to ask Mabel again. She'll tell me and then I'll probably forget in about a week. Yeah, knowing how much we have doesn't help me do my job.
QUESTION: I mean your wage personally?
MR. NEWMARK: Oh me, personally? How much do I make? Again, I just don't tell people that. That's kind of -- I guess we regard that as personal. Yeah, it's very odd. In different cultures, people talk about it all the time, but especially as a computer nerd, I don't talk about that very much. Like I'm surprised when I read English novels, Jane Austin and all that, when the subject of how much money someone makes is a topic of conversation as someone is trying to fix someone else up for marriage.
QUESTION: How recently have you personally used Craigslist for your own needs; an apartment, a car, whatever?
MR. NEWMARK: Recently, I haven't used my own site. The most -- actually, the most honest reason for that is that sometime after some hours of doing customer service and having seen some one or two ugly things, I'm ready to go offline and watch TV or something. I have sold a car through Craigslist, but on the other hand, I met -- oh, I met the girlfriend just through my local coffeehouse. And these days, if I have something to sell, I'm much more likely to give it away than to try to sell it because sometimes, you're just tired. And yeah, sometimes, even the eye strain gets to be a fair problem.
MODERATOR: I think we have time for one or two more questions if anyone has --
QUESTION: What is your sense of what Craigslist has changed in how people interact?
MR. NEWMARK: Okay, Craigslist change; in a way, when it comes to the people, not much change. People help each other out. Sometimes people bicker and argue pointlessly, but that's true from the beginning and that just reflects the human reality. As a site, we've had more categories, more cities. We have better tools for dealing with bad guys, but those are all very small incremental changes. In some respects, in terms of our culture, we haven't changed from the very beginning. We're very simple. There's not much to change.
QUESTION: You become more and more knowing by Craigslist. Are you plan -- one day to be -- to run for the presidential election in the USA?
MR. NEWMARK: No, Washington is too humid and it's not too different from New York right now. San Francisco, we never allow it to get this hot or humid. In -- yeah, that's right, in San Francisco, the temperature goes roughly between 40 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
So -- yeah, I have no interest in power. It's just, from my point of view, something which will interfere with my napping. And again, I -- sometimes I want help from politicians in terms of dealing with bad guys or sometimes, somebody tries to pass a law which respects -- which interferes with freedom of speech on the net. That's of interest. And again, in this presidential election, well, what I think we need is somebody who reminds Americans of what our values are and what we're supposed to be about, and I think we need that pretty badly.
And I'm just -- I'm just paying some kinds of attention, but again, for April Fools' in 1999, I announced my candidacy for mayor of San Francisco. And this was a joke, but people forgot what day it was, April 1st, and actually thought I was serious and liked it. But again, I think political jobs, I'm not interested in and in particular, Washington, genuinely too humid.
MODERATOR: I think we have one last question here from French media.
QUESTION: How much time -- you say you spend most of your time solving cases. How much time do you spend on business development? And I want to know exactly what you mean by solving cases. Is it really solving individual cases or how many a day do you solve?
MR. NEWMARK: Well, in terms of business development, we don't do it. We have none, which is a good, short answer. Solving cases, just trying to think of this -- most of them are very simple. Like in New York, there are apartment brokers, unethical ones, maybe crooked ones, who will try to pretend to be apartment owners who we don't charge to post on the site. And then again, now and then, we have situations where someone will post someone else's phone number on our site with the intention of getting prank phone calls directed to the person they want to victimize. We have to help out with that kind of thing.
There's different other apartment scams. In New York something -- well, which works now and then, sometimes a bad guy will sublet an apartment and then he'll put an ad up someplace, in The Times or our site. Well, he will try to sublet that apartment out to a dozen other people and collecting deposits and cash from those other people because of the nature of the apartment market here. That happens. I saw it once in San Francisco, but we've seen it several times here. When that happens, we will work with the cops and the district attorney here to stop that. And in fact, we've actually helped send one or two bad guys away to Rikers Island for a long vacation.
MODERATOR: All right. Okay. Well, thanks very much for all of your questions and for Mr. Newmark and for his time with us. To answer one of your questions and perhaps all of your questions, we have, for your information, printed out the Craigslist homepage as well as, from your website, Craigslist Fact Sheet, and we will place that on the blue table over there for your information.
MR. NEWMARK: But if people have questions, I'm much too easy to find. It's just craig@craigslist.org.
MODERATOR: Great. Thanks very much, all of you, as well as you, Mr. Newmark.
