That would be Craig Newmark, as profiled by Philip Weiss in New York, proprietor of Craigslist, and he is wounding the newspaper business by taking its real estate and other advertising, with a website that looks like Yahoo! ten years ago:

I’m a guy who may or may not exist. I want to assure all your readers that I don’t exist. I’ll add, as a bonus joke for all the physics nerds, I exist in a state of quantum superposition, simultaneously existing and nonexisting.

And from the same article:

At the convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last spring, two panelists at a session on the crisis in the industry flashed a slide of Newmark and asked the editors how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was. A faint show of hands. Craigslist? A few more.

“The shocking thing is that this was someone who was not only a threat to steal their business but was in the process of doing it,” says Jay Rosen, a blogger (the name of his blog is PressThink) and professor of journalism at NYU. “What industry could survive in which you don’t know the name of the person who is taking away your business? They’re mystified. They don’t know who this guy is and where he came from. And it just shows—that it’s easier for Craig to learn journalism than it is for these guys to learn the Web.”

To give you the scale: “Craigslist’s largest category is New York apartments, where it posts more than half a million listings a month.” The MSM may not have ever heard of Craig Newmark, who is currently eating their lunch in small bites at the revenue rate of $20 million per year. But not every media business is so benighted. For example, there are stories

“that eBay is studying Craigslist so that it can eat it alive. It’s not the only one with an appetite. Google has recently come up with Google Base. Overseas, eBay already has Kijiji. Microsoft is trying, too. “You know there are roomfuls of guys at Microsoft, Google, and eBay thinking, How can we beat Craigslist?” Gibson says. They may never be able to replace Craigslist’s cultural cachet, but they might be more efficient and undermine the list that way.”

To be fair to the MSM, Craig Newmark is a flyspeck in the $16 billion world of annual classified advertising in newspapers. On the other hand, Craigslist gets 10 million users a month and 3 billion page views and is growing, in an environment where readership of classified ads has been falling for years.

You’d think that the MSM would have heard of the guy by now. HT: Thomas Lifson.

UPDATE

The price umbrella that the NYT has over Craigslist on real estate listings is either $175 or $275, depending on the services you choose.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 9:06 am and is filed under art, culture, business, General, Left of Left, MSM, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.