Dear Craigslist: Make More Money, Do More Good!

If you're not familiar with the fantastic start-up story of Craigslist and how it rose into the top 10 websites in the US, Dylan Tweney of Wired's podcast interview is one starting point. But it's enough to know that a huge part of the lore is that Craig Newmark never intended to make money with his list of San Francisco-area events and announcements. And that he's one of the very few internet prodigies to resist making every vain attempt to monetize the eyeballs he began accumulating over a decade ago.

Revenue estimates for the small private company are normally in the $20-50M range; despite all its traffic, Craigslist still only charges for job postings in seven cities and apartment listings in the Big Apple (according to wikipedia).

What we propose is a simple innovation designed NOT to suddenly make Craigslist a billion dollar business but to "leverage" its popularity to introduce a much-needed web innovation that improves the user experience while also giving the company more money to do more good.

It's simple (or so I, a techno-moron, pretend): design a micropayment widget and collect a small fee, $1 or $2, for a lot more of the posts. A good rule would be that any category typically posted by businesses would require the tiny payment: job postings and apartments, and maybe service offerings. The rest of the community categories remain free and untouched.

Why this would be good for Craigslist's legion of devoted users:

1) It would actually improve the user experience by clearing out a lot of the clutter and crap that is currently spammed in the job postings and apartment settings. Craigslist is an amazing marketplace, but everyone once in a while, especially in these two sections, you the user can definitely start to feel like the target of rip-off artists.

2) It may help discourage lecherous third party profiteers from trying to capitalize on the big board's success (great Josh Lowensohn CNET article on CL turning of Listpic for such maneuvering)

3) There is no single pervasive micropayment system available on the web. Paypal and Checkout are proving that a secure, ubiquitous payment system can work at regular retail scale, and maybe one of them could even provide this micropayment platform. (Paypal is owned by eBay, which owns 25% of Craigslist.) A simple, secure and widely adopted micropayment system could be used far beyond Craigslist, from non-profit fundraising to microlending or investing in urban, youth or international startups. Few companies would have the clout to launch such a tool, but Craigslist has a dedicated audience that would probably tolerate it and access to a huge readership of talent that could make it a reality.

4) It would give the Craigslist Foundation a bigger warchest to pursue its Activist/Philanthropist goals like helping non-profits focus their strategy or helping communities rate and rank service providers or even political candidates. (see Donna Bogatin post on ZDNet)

Small is the new big, as Seth Godin would say, and Craigslist is the poster child of providing a focused service that is unparalleled and uncompromised. Still, opening up the revenue stream just a wee bit could be a good thing for everyone.