Sign on San Diego: Documentary Chronicles Craigslist's Virtual Community
Wired: Craigslist: Now It's a Movie, Too

The Sign on San Diego piece [the first one we linked to here] is an interesting, well-written article about a documentary project to profile a day in the life of Craigslist:

Should he dispatch camera crews to shoot the Ethel Merman drag queen auditioning drummers for his '70s-style rock band? The penny-pinching foodies seeking comrades for a late-night taqueria tour? The cash-strapped transsexual selling "erotic services" to pay for a sex change? Or the heart-tugging tale of a woman looking for someone to adopt her blind Australian Shepherd dog?

Such are the quandaries of the director of an ambitious documentary about Craigslist, the wildly popular Web site where millions of cyber citizens buy, sell, swap and debate everything from politics and condos to poodles and casual sex.

What seems glaringly missing from the profile, however, was any estimate as to how much money the company makes. A few clues in the article, though, along with a review of the site itself, allow for a rough estimate.

As the article points out, Craigslist charges only for job lists, at $75. All other categories of ads are free to post. The article also suggested that five out of eight of postings come from the San Francisco Bay Area section of the site. So, I counted all the job postings for yesterday, Tuesday, August 5th, which totaled 363 in 24 categories. At $75 per job listing, that works out to $27,225 in revenue for Tuesday.

Initially, I then rounded that up to account for the rest of the county (multiplying by 1.6), but on closer inspection, I see that they apparently charge for ads only the SF Bay Area, which is a bizarre business decision, if you ask me, but that's what the site clearly states.

So, multiplying Tuesday's revenue by 240 days a year (excluding weekends and holidays, to be conservative) gives $6.5 million in annual reveue. Not bad for a 14-person company.

I have something of a personal story as regards the site's founder, Craig Newmark. My sister used to work with him at a prior job of his, and she really didn't care for him. She used to send me these long emails extolling the latest mishaps of a colleague she identified only as "Dufas." It always made my day to get another letter in the Adventures of Dufas. Later, when I first discovered Craigslist years ago, she sneered with disgust, "That's Dufas!" Well, looks like he had the last laugh, after all. My sister remains toiling away many years later in the same job, and no one's making a documentary about her and her riches.