David Kirkpatrick of Fortune interviewed Jim Buckmaster, trying to get to the bottom of a company that could in theory be a $500 million company if they thought that it may be worth being that. "Why NOT make money with it?," David asked. Jim pointed out that it is in fact a very healthy business for several years and yet still feel that they are making a difference in the world without pursuing "insane wealth" - avoiding bodyguards, etc. Refreshing, to be sure, but also indicative of how everyday user-publishers can make a decent living: in some ways Craigslist is the classic small business grown up but that decided to "stay in the family" rather than go public. Jim sees the Web as offering new opportunities for newspapers, so he's not ready to write off journalism with or without the classified ad revenues that have supported them until recently. 90 percent of classified revenues are still in print, Jim notes, but not surprisingly sees online taking a larger share.

David tried to poke out some "what should newspapers do" dialogue out of Jim, but he's content to just focus on his users. "Sounds kind of wild, I know," he notes, but he has a very focused model that works, so why not? Instead of telling papers what to do, he works with advertisers who are willing to pay for premium services, gets feedback from users who flag inaccuracies and problems via an automated voting system a la eBay. eBay now owns 25 percent of Craigslist, so those kinds of synergies seem to be there, especially with ideas on consumer protection. But Jim sees eBay focusing on long-distance transactions requiring services such as PayPal, whereas Craigslist focuses on encouraging shoppers to know the person you're dealing with on the other side of a listing. Just because The New Aggregation allows new suppliers such as Craigslist to monetize specific sections of today's newspapers doesn't mean that journalism won't have new revenue streams to pay for their skills: it just means that their employers need to flow their investment into more services related to the unique content that they can manage best.

David noted a report that had Craigslist may have taken as much as USD 50 million out of the San Francisco classifieds marketplace, and Jim noted that Craigslist may have more traffic on job postings than Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com combines. So even as paper publishers feel a bite out of their side traditional online database publishers need to adjust to the power of databases that give users more of a sense of control and community. Needless to say Jim doesn't seem to feel that competition is much worth thinking about at this point, especially since his traffic grew by 200 percent last year. "Maybe if that goes down to 100 percent growth we'll think about it," Jim notes. The demographics of users are continuing to trend to expand into older audiences out of its original youth following, so there's good reason to think that the growth will continue for some time. The scraping of robots is blocked regularly to keep traffic loads reasonable for user access, but Jim sees scrapers as offering "sub-par reasons for accessing Craigslist.

"Focus on your users and blot everything else - I don't know a better strategy than that," Jim notes. A question from the audience asked about more features that users ask for, but he's not trying to be on the bleeding edge of technology. They start at the top of the user request list and work down from there. It's still mostly open source AJAX/LAMP technology, with just a smattering of specialized tools for firewalling and such, and still about 18 people driving things. Since he's not trying to maximize revenues it's not necessary to hire in sales staffs and other traditional cost factors: the efficiency of the technology and the brilliance of the basic ideas carries the day. This may not appeal to the "Gold Rushers" chasing Web 2.0 revenues, but nobody seems to leave. The gold is indeed in ideas such as Craigslist, but it seems to accrue pretty efficiently when you think less about gold and more about people with the right idea in hand.