'There's A Lot of Misinformation Out There': Craigslist's Founder Sets the Record Straight on How He Grew an Email Side Hustle Into a Business Worth Billions Craigslist turns 30 this year.
By Erin Davis
Craigslist, the online classifieds site where you can sell a television or meet your spouse through "missed connections," is turning 30.
To celebrate the feat, founder Craig Newmark, 72, who now spends all of his time working in philanthropy, took to LinkedIn to set the record straight on the company's history, "since there's a lot of misinformation out there," he wrote.
Newmark admits that there are "no records" of Craigslist's early days, so this is his "best take at early history" to tell the real story of how the venerable site began and "talk about some things that I've spoken about before but rarely get reported on," Newmark said.
Related: Craigslist's Founder Is Donating $100 Million to Cybersecurity. Here's Why.
In the video, Newmark says that he moved to San Francisco in 1993 and used the Internet (then in its early days) to help with the move and learn about the neighborhoods, restaurants, and what's happening in the technology and arts scenes.
"This is 1995 when the dot com bubble was just becoming a thing in San Francisco," Newmark says. "When I heard about something going on, I would send it to a small mailing list or specifically a copy list of 10 to 12 people who might be interested."
Decades before Substack became popular, Newmark's email bulletin became a must-read in the city.
"The thing spread word of mouth and people kept asking to be added, people started telling me about events they wanted to communicate, and it just kept growing," Newmark said.
After working in IT at Charles Schwab, he picked up some gig work in web design and web coding, but his "mailing list kept growing."
"When it hit about 240 addresses, it broke, and I had to use a listserver," Newmark said.
The rest, as they say, is history — though Craigslist hasn't changed. And it still looks straight out of the 1990s.
Although the company is private and doesn't share its revenue numbers, Newmark recently shared a LinkedIn post that seemingly endorsed some data, including that Craigslist gets a whopping 20 billion pageviews monthly, it's worth an estimated $3 billion today, and it makes about $694 million in annual revenue from its simple fee structure.
However, Newmark, notes one error: He's not a billionaire.
"Very appreciated, but no billionaire, in part because of giving away all Craigslist equity to my 501c4, a couple of years ago," he wrote.
Newmark was reportedly worth $1.3 billion in 2020 and pledged to give away almost all his wealth to charitable causes in December 2022.
Newmark noted that more videos with behind-the-scenes tidbits are on the way.
