Content Matters

According to the Wall Street Journal, Craigslist has just added 100 new cities, including 20 outside the United States, bringing its total coverage to 300 cities.

According to Staci at PaidContent, the expansion includes 72 US cities plus 28 international cities from Beirut to Helsinki.

In the article, WSJ editor Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster over lunch and bloody mary's.  They hit on most of the standard topics (why do you leave a half billion dollars on the table?), but provide some interesting insights to Buckmaster's thinking.

Carney quotes Buckmaster  "I do think that the Internet is a spectacular tool for any information business -- newsgathering and other journalistic enterprises are essentially in the information business. Another aspect to it that gets reported on is drawing the lines within the Internet itself with respect to content generators and various kinds of aggregation and search tools.

Where does the revenue end up in those kinds of scenarios over time? I think you'll see the lines will move from side to side in terms of where the revenue lands among the various players in the information economy, which is still very young."

Craigslist continues to be a very interesting experiment in how a content technology company can deliver fantastic value to its users while taking a low cost, minimalist approach to its entire business.  While those outside the classified business may think Craigslist is not their problem, we can expect others to try to emulate Craigslist and freemium models in all aspects of the content space.