Craig Newmark

Founder of Craigslist

• Born: December 6, 1952
• Place of Birth: Morristown, New Jersey

Primary Company/Organization: Craigslist

Introduction

Craig Newmark founded Craigslist to build a community that could use the Internet as a tool to help others: a simple site that connects people around the world, where they can satisfy basic human needs in finding work, shelter, and relationships in one place. Despite Craigslist's success, Newmark stuck to his core values and remained a “customer service representative” for his own site, using undisclosed profits to fund citizen journalism projects and other causes involving civic participation.

Early Life

Craig Alexander Newmark was born to Jewish parents on December 6, 1952, in Morristown, New Jersey. His father, Lee, was a salesman who dealt in food, insurance, and promotional items. His mother, Joyce, was a bookkeeper. The pair met at a synagogue dance. Tragically, Newmark's father died of cancer just six months after the young boy's bar mitzvah. Newmark was rarely invited to other children's parties; one teacher sent him to a school counselor, who gave up on therapy and taught him chess. Newmark embraced his social awkwardness as part of “being a nerd,” and to complete the image he wore thick glasses with a piece of tape holding them together. As a boy, he also loved science fiction and comic books.

Newmark graduated from Morristown High in 1971. He was active on the debate team and the forensics club, and he had also started a go club. Newmark attended college at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, originally planning to study physics. Instead, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science in 1975 and 1977, respectively. His social problems continued; a book called Language in Thought and Action made him realize that he—not other people—had a communication problem.

Life's Work

After college, Newmark worked for International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) from 1976 to 1993, first spending six years in Boca Raton, Florida, then ten years in Detroit, Michigan, attempting to work his way up the corporate ladder. He moved to San Francisco in 1993 to work for Charles Schwab and Company as a systems security architect and general consultant. In 1995, Newmark became an independent contractor and developed software for companies such as Bank of America, Xircon (now Intel), and Sun Microsystems.

While working as an independent contractor, Newmark observed people on the Internet, the WELL, and Usenet helping one another. He started socializing with computer and technology experts, who saw their emerging field as revolutionary, blending art, social media, and science. In early 1995, Newmark decided to join this community of helpers and technologists, using e-mail to inform people about art and technology events in San Francisco.

News of the list spread through word of mouth, and people asked to be added to the e-mail list, which led to their friends requesting to be added. Soon people were asking Newmark to include job listings and items for sale. Newmark realized that he could add apartments for rent to this list as well. By the middle of 1995, Newmark's e-mail list included 240 addresses, exceeding the limit of e-mail addresses he could include in a cc box. At that point, Newmark posted the list for public consumption using a list server that required a name. Craig wanted to call it “sf-events” (for San Francisco events), but his friends told him to call it Craigslist because that is what everyone was already calling it, and the name reinforced the list's personal and down-to-earth nature.

For a few years, Newmark ran Craigslist as a hobby site. In the beginning, it ran on a single PC with a 128-megabyte hard drive in his living room. In 1998, Craigslist's popularity had increased to the point where Newmark had recruited some volunteers to help him run the site, with little success. The site had thousands of readers, and communication with this number of people became overwhelming for Newmark. During that year, tech recruiter Christina Murphy, a frequent poster to the early list, teamed with Internet consultant Nancy Melone to get Newmark to join them in starting a nonprofit called the List Foundation. Melone intended for the List Foundation to serve as a host for Craigslist; job recruiters would pay $30 per ad, and any money left after paying the cost of upkeep and administration would be given away.

Newmark made Melone chief executive officer (CEO) of Craigslist, but he had no interest in making money or becoming a dot-com company; he wanted to maintain the integrity of Craigslist as a community service. Newmark and Melone split as a result of their philosophical differences. In late 1999, Craigslist users who entered the site through listfoundation.org were bounced to a new, for-profit website called Metro Vox, run by Melone, offering community listings similar to those of Craigslist but for a profit. Craigslist fans rejected Metro Vox, and the site went bankrupt in 2001.

In 2000, Newmark devoted his energy full time to Craigslist. That year, he hired Jim Buckmaster, a self-taught computer programmer who lived in a communal housing development, making sandals out of car tires. Buckmaster transferred Craigslist to a multiserver environment and a number of other cities. He redesigned Craigslist so that users could search, review, post, send and receive messages, and flag problems, which greatly reduced the amount of staff support needed for the site, as well as the need for Newmark to answer as many e-mails and phone calls. Buckmaster launched Craigslist in Boston in June 2000, then two months later in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. He expanded the categories to include child care, political and legal discussion forums, the Missed Connections list, and, in the interest of plainness, a category headed “Men Seeking Sex.” After a week, Newmark, a devotee of the television series Sex and the City, came up with the title “Casual Encounters.” In December 2000, Newmark appointed Buckmaster as CEO, and Buckmaster would continue to hold that position.

Both Newmark and Buckmaster see Craigslist in social, rather than financial, terms. Newmark is not interested in taking Craigslist public or selling it for billions of dollars. “Make a comfortable living and then make a difference” is Newmark's philosophy.

As of 2022, Craigslist was active in more than one hundred cities in seventy countries, with an average of 250 million visitors per month. In San Francisco, city authorities declared October 10 Craigslist Day. The site attracts millions of users but also much criticism. The newspaper industry blames its demise in part on Craigslist and its free online classified ads. Others have found fault in Craigslist security measures, particularly after an episode in 2009, when the so-called Craigslist Killer posted an ad to the adult services section in order to entice and kill prostitutes. CEO Buckmaster claimed that Craigslist manually reviewed every adult service ad posted and required phone verification by the person placing it, but this was not sufficient. The fact that Craigslist even allowed an adult services section where pimps or prostitutes could advertise their services was declared tantamount to a promotion of prostitution by the state of South Carolina and therefore an illegal activity. The Craigslist Killer case forced Craigslist to shut down its adult services category in the United States and its erotic services category elsewhere. The episode also focused international attention on the dangers of the Internet and debate about the responsibility of website owners in monitoring and regulating potentially criminal activity facilitated by the service.

Personal Life

In 2001, Newmark founded the Craigslist Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that helps emerging nonprofit organizations. His first two contributions through this foundation were for eye examinations and glasses for Israeli and Palestinian children. He has also given thousands of dollars to other Israeli and Palestinian organizations devoted to peace in the Middle East, as well as women's shelters and a free clinic for sex workers. To organize and foster social media connections for his various philanthropic causes, he began the website craigconnects.org in 2011. He has focused more on supporting various causes over the years.

In 2005, Time magazine ranked Newmark as twenty-eighth on its list of the world's 100 Most Influential People. Newmark expressed his goal of using the revenues from Craigslist to replace newspapers and reporters with “citizen journalists” who would cover the news online without the influence of political parties or corporate advertisers. His zeal for citizen journalism derives from his disgust for how the mainstream media covered the Iraq War. Politically, Newmark has described himself as both moderate and libertarian; he has donated money to the campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans.

The entrepreneur remained involved with his namesake website into the late 2010s and early 2020s. As of 2017, he still answered customer-service emails regarding the site. He and his wife, Eileen Whelpley, whom he married in 2012, live in San Francisco and enjoy birdwatching together. As of 2020, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $1.3 billion.

Bibliography

"Craig Newmark." Forbes, 7 Apr. 2020, www.forbes.com/profile/craig-newmark/?sh=2c7ea1eb7a4c. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Freese, Susan M. Craigslist: The Company and Its Founder. North Mankato: ABDO, 2011. Print.

Newmark, Craig. “Craig Newmark: Founder of Craigslist.” Interview by Jessica Livingston. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.

Newmark, Craig. Craigconnects: Connecting the World for the Common Good. 28 June 2012. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Smith, David. "Craigslist's Craig Newmark: 'Outrage Is Profitable. Most Online Outrage Is Faked for Profit.'" The Guardian, 14 July 2019, www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/14/craigslist-craig-newmark-outrage-is-profitable-most-online-outrage-is-faked-for-profit. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.