Wired.com had an interesting article about Craigslist and its founder, Craig Newmark. The online article was from the actual Wired magazine.
I’ve been following the whole Craigslist saga for years, so much of it was old news to me, but I was struck by the following passage:
Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30. …. Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings. The staff communicates by email and IM.
And the article mentions a consulting firm that tracks Craigslist’s paid ads, and the firm estimates the site’s revenue for 2009 will probably exceed $100 million.
I understand that Ebay and Amazon have larger revenues, but look at the headcount disparity. Wow.
Update: Sorry, had this written last night and never got around to posting.