craigslist is my hero

These are misleading figures. When internet properties get bought out by corporations, it is definitely not fair to compare between the total employees of the parent company.

If anything its a testament to staying in the game without being bought out, not the success of small development teams.

Ignoring the well-known issues with Alexa numbers, the other factor to consider is that some of these companies’ employees are tasked with jobs other than building Internet traffic.

Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., the Beeb and even Microsoft provide products and services that aren’t specific at all to the Internet.

More interesting is to see, with the exception of Craig’s almost-two-dozen, how similar the workforces of the Internet “pure plays” are.

The critics are missing the point. Take off two zeroes from the others and it remains a testament to what’s achievable when remaining lean and focused.

I’ll avoid the whole argument about how valid Alexa and such are for now.

I will however pick on the general concept. As jack and Jay noted already, these numbers are very misleading when companies that have massive resources in non-web areas (Disney, Time Warner, etc). I’d suggest that a more helpful/interesting ratio would be revenue and profit versus number of employees. Of course I think that Craigslist would be much further down the list and therefor not serve their purpose of displaying such a list in the first place.

I’m glad Craigslist is doing well, but that doesn’t put them above putting out numbers that put them in the best light. And I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with not being sufficiently cynical about numbers that companies tout.

This table is pretty much useless.

1) They are only looking at english page rankings, but counting the entire company population. I would think there are a few people at each of those companies that may look at something other than the english versions.

2) Why title the first column “Pages” if your really representing a ranking there? The order of the items pretty much makes the first column redundant information. Actual page views would be so much more meaningful.

3) Alexa?! Why not just use your own server logs, I’m sure they could give you quite a bit more useful information than a third party. Doesn’t Alexa rankings depend on if a person has the Alexa toolbar installed anyway?

The signal is burried under all of the noise in this chart.

-steve

Microsoft has 70k employees?!? Are they all working on Zune?

Why not just use your own server logs, I’m sure they could give you quite a bit more useful information than a third party.

Right, I’m sure Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and the others on the list would be more than happy to give up their server logs so someone could do this comparison.

(Note sarcasam.)

Craigslist has their own servers. No need to have Yahoo, Google or MS provide data at all.

I think I’ve proved my own point about why this table is horrible. It appears as though I have completely misinterpreted this table, and what they are trying to say with it.

My original thought was that they were trying to say where visitors to Craigslist were coming from.

Upon second/third inspection they are actually trying to make a point about the traffic going to each of these (hence the use of Alexa and not local logs).

All nitpicking aside, the table shows that Craigslist is an amazing story. No marketing department, no revenue driven investors breathing down their throats, just a pure internet community that relies on user generated content and community policing.

Long before anyone coined the terms “Social Networking” or “User Generated Content,” one of the first (and still the best) community sites was www.Craigslist.org. The site was founded by Craig Newmark, an unusual person with an almost unheard of lack of desire to cash in.

Craig has stated on many occasions that the site is nothing without the user community. His title is Founder, Chairman, Customer Service Representative. Craigslist operates as a not for profit entity that has grown organically, with a limited revenue model, a sparse user interface and a fanatically loyal user base who police the site.

They resist the siren song of growing revenue through advertising, affiliate programs, co-marketing, etc. Ebay bought a minority stake a few years ago but has lived by the agreement they made with the founder to be hands off and not demand a cash return.

If Craigslist suddenly sold for the $10-20 billion it would be worth on the open market, the site would have to start generating a few billion dollars a year and fundamentally change the community that created it.

Full disclosure requires me to state that I have used Craigslist for the last nine years. I met my wife through Craigslist, found a few house mates, a job, and bought things including a hot tub, a pool table, furniture, and Giants tickets. I dream that some day one of my posts will be voted to the “best-of-craigslist” archives.

that was fun. now let’s chart pageviews against revenue.

This table shows that Craigslist is an anomaly and huge companies with thousands of employees are the way to go.

I think I’ve proved my own point about why this table is horrible. It appears as though I have completely misinterpreted this table, and what they are trying to say with it.

This is my new favorite method for constructing any sort of argument against something!

Based upon the apparent rounding, should Craigslist be in the chart as having 1,000 employees or zero?

I have a hard time believing that Google’s page ranks are so low. That’s just too much to believe. Yahoo’s sweet and all, but they’re not #1 compared to Google. And then to see Time Warner up so high? That’s impossible.

To see craigslist so high sounds neat, but I really doubt it.

Yeah, well, Craigslist is basically an online classifieds, isn’t it? Hardly comparable to Google’s or Yahoo’s product empire. And as someone else pointed out, many aren’t even comparable.

BTW , does anyone know why Firefox (1.5 and 2.0) never remembers form info for this site? Add the fact that there is no “remember me” checkbox here, and it makes it a real PITA to comment here. :(

Hardly comparable to Google’s or Yahoo’s product empire.

Uh, yeah, Yahoo! has all those flashing blinking images, and ads in every possible nook and cranny of the page. Craigslist doesn’t have all that stuff. Yeah, Yahoo! must be better.

“BTW , does anyone know why Firefox (1.5 and 2.0) never remembers form info for this site?”

Because you at some point clicked “never for this site” when Firefox asked you whether to remember the info.

You can probably find this in your settings and fix it.

Go to Tools, Options, Security, Exceptions, find the site, and change the setting.

I agree with everyone else, this isn’t useful or accurate.

Another reason this isn’t accurate: craigslist is partially owned (25%) by eBay. It should be listed in parentheses after eBay. This, of course, then renders the whole chart moot.

Jed:

You missed my point. I’m wasn’t saying one is better than the other, just that it’s unfair to put them in the same league; if Craigslist wanted to compete in the same areas as Yahoo or Google, they’d need more than 23 people.

I’ve looked in all the exceptions lists. Anyway, it worked this time. I don’t comment here often, so perhaps the browser crashed in the same session that I made a comment here, after the SVN upgrade.

The reason they only have 23 employees is they haven’t made any material changes to their site in 10 years. The 23 employees are just running the office, not doing any development. Whereas everybody else (in the other companies) is more or less continually building the next version of their application.

Steve, wow!

Supermike, Yahoo Mail, Sports and Finance are extremely widely used. TimeWarner includes AOL , obviously.

Eme, what does a minority investor have to do with anything? Google is a minority owner of AOL .

Josiah, is your point that it’s possible to gain a massive customer by restraining service modification?

This is just ChartJunk through and through. I know it’s already been said, but the numbers are really irrelevant. There’s no listing of the supposed “page views” that are used to rank the companies. The head-count numbers are a bit suspicious also, all of them rounded to at least the nearest 1,000 if not more. How did Google end up with 10,000 employees when on both Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=GOOG), the supposed source for the headcount, and on Hoovers, the company is listed with 5,680 employees? Admittedly, these are 2005 annual report numbers, but then where are the people at Craigslist that put this together getting their numbers? Fishy, real fishy.

Again, as almost everyone has mentioned, comparing Disney’s 130,000 employees, which stretch across movie studios, animation, the largest theme-park chain on the planet, TV studios and stations (the entire ABC network, ESPN networks, part of Lifetime, Disney channel, etc.) to Craigslist is “mis-leading” to say the least.