Monday, March 3, 2008

craigslist BS: Craig lets Jim do the dirty work for him...

EVEN MORE: Jim appears to have some difficulty with spewing all that BS (his voice is wavering in places) but he manages...; Craig is just having a grand old time... towards the end of the video (at the begining he is just his ususal boring self) --> a sucker born every minute when it comes to journalists, is it not? (and not ONLY journalists...looks like VCs too...)

MORE:(towards the end of the interview) "So then, do you have employees that speak those languages?" -->HAHAHA; shows you just how credulous she is... (craigslist's touted "Spanish language support" is ONE volunteer out of Spain...) and of course Jim is just confusing the interviewer some more ( "we do have coverage of a few languages" --> like what? spanish and...English! *lol*) and leaves it to that... he even had her giggling at one point -- where do they find all these groupies?); just listen to that interview it's riddled with this crap... from begining to end... "that puts us, I think, in the top 7 as far as traffic in the English language world" --> the worst thing is that this keeps being presented as a fact by other "journalists" without ever checking... (and missing the fact that craigslist has been going down in traffic rank, reach, and pages views per user for a long time...used to be 7 in the US, its been 10 for a long time; overall its fall has been even steeper, its 65 now and it was 60 last time a checked...
exlanation
.....
(and Jim doesn't skip a beat)

Jim (1/5 into the interview): "back in 1998 when the site had no revenew whatsoever, Craig went to the users to ask how he might raise some money to offset costs, which were becoming considerable and which were coming out of his pocket since he was running craigslist as a hobby..."

--> well, see for yourself! (in 1998 craigslist was "List Foundation" -- a corporation -- you have to incorporate first and then get the tax exemption if you operate as a non-profit foundation and had sponsors listed on the website, on top of what people where pitching in in terms of time and other resources, formally and informaly and had done so for a long long time...)

--> so in 1999 they "forgot" about the non-profit thing --they just let their non-profit classification lapse -- and became "profitable"? what? how do you get from asking the community that built craigslist for some way to offset costs to being a for-profit that keeps getting fatter and fatter... while providing as little customer service and improvements as they can get away with? and more importantly, how do you get the media to eat all the BS and keep regurgitating it ad infinitum? (this is the story of craigslist and a very embarrassing moment for journalism...)

Delia

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