We all need a way to make money, but we don’t have to make money from everything we do. What we need is a cash cow for one thing. The rest we can give away for free.
Craigslist charges for jobs and is rumored to bring in $100 million. People say Craigslist doesn’t care about making money, but I think they do. They just focus on the piece that is super efficient - charging businesses for job listings and landlords for apartment listings in a few markets. I’ve seen it speculated that they could make many millions more from ads. Hmmm. I don’t think that’s really the case. Quantcast shows CL at around 45 million US visitors. My estimate is that they could make about 12 - 16 million if they added AdSense to their pages. That’s roughly 15% more money, but not so much money that it’s worth the risk of putting off the community, slowing down the site, and competing with their listers that ultimately bring people in so that the section of their site people pay for has real value.
They have their cash cow and the rest is free.
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