{"id":269980,"date":"2024-12-09T15:09:01","date_gmt":"2024-12-09T20:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=269980"},"modified":"2024-12-09T16:04:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T21:04:03","slug":"we-make-plenty-of-money-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/12\/09\/we-make-plenty-of-money-already\/","title":{"rendered":"“We make plenty of money already”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I posted this tweet<\/a> today, and I thought I would expand on the story for anyone who might be interested. The comment from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster came during an interview at Mesh, the Toronto web conference that I started with a few friends in 2006, which ran until 2016 (I wrote a longer retrospective about Mesh here<\/a>). Buckmaster was a speaker in 2007 \u2014 we tried to get Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to come but we got Jim instead; years later I would get to know Craig through a journalism conference in Perugia<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim did a one-on-one interview with my friend and Mesh co-founder Mark Evans (this made for a somewhat amusing image, to me at least, because Jim is six foot eight and Mark is about five foot seven). After the interview, there was time for questions, and someone asked how much Craigslist spent on marketing. “We don’t do any marketing,” Jim said (I am paraphrasing). “We don’t even have a marketing department.” I saw some heads turn and people clearly surprised that a website that was the ninth largest in the world at the time didn’t have a marketing department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Then Jim mentioned how he had been at a Wall Street conference of brokers or investment bankers and someone asked how they planned to monetize the website \u2014 sell advertising, etc. And (to my memory at least) Jim said: “I told them we’re not planning to monetize the site, because we don’t really need the money. We already make lots of money.” He said there was a long silence after he answered the question, as though no one could imagine *not* monetizing the heck out of something. And I saw more than one head shake at Mesh too. For some people, I guess, there is no such thingas enough money.<\/p>\n

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