Craig Newmark is an American Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist best known for being the founder of the website Craigslist, a classified advertisement website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
Early life and education
Craig Alexander Newmark was born on December 6, 1952, in Morristown, New Jersey. Newmark is the son of Lee and Joyce Newmark. Growing up, Newmark attended a Jewish religious school. Newmark’s father, Lee, was an insurance salesman and died when he was thirteen, and his mother struggled financially, moving him and Jeff, his brother into an apartment in Jacob Ford Village.
In 1971, Newmark graduated from Morristown High School and received a Bachelor’s degree in 1975 and a Master’s degree in 1977.
Early career
After Newmark graduated, he served for 17 years as a programmer at IBM, living in Boca Raton, Detroit, Florida, and New Jersey. In 1993, Newmark transferred to San Francisco to work for Charles Schwab, where he was introduced to the Internet, which at that time was still commercial-free.
Craigslist
Newmark began Craigslist as a free marketplace where people could exchange information and come together without charge. Having witnessed people assisting one another in social, friendly, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the MindVox, WELL, and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative stranger to San Francisco, Newmark decided to build something related for local events and founded his company called Craigslist.
In early 1995, Newmark launched an email distribution list to friends. Newmark submitted most of the first few postings and were notices of social events of interest to Internet developers and software living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. When people began using the mailing list for non-event postings, there was no limitation, and Newmark was astonished about it. People were striving to get technical positions filled noticed that the list was a helpful way to find people with skills they were looking for the job. It inspired Newmark to add job categories.
User requested for more categories that made the list of categories to arise. The first technology found some limits, so by June 1995 the introduced Majordomo and the mailing list Craigslist continued operations. Community members began asking for a web interface. Newmark registered craigslist.org, and in 1996, the website went live. In the fall of 1998, they organized List Foundation, and Craigslist began transitioning to the use of this name. When Newmark heard of other organizations called List Foundation in April 1999, they stopped using this name.
In 1999, Craigslist joined as a private for-profit company. Around the time of these events, Newmark understood the site was developing so fast that he could quit working as a software engineer and dedicate his full concentration to working Craigslist. There were nine employees by April 2000, operating out of Newmark’s San Francisco apartment. In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as CTO and lead programmer. Buckmaster influenced the site’s search engine, personals categories, multi-city architecture, discussion forums, self-posting process, flagging system, homepage design, and best-of-Craigslist feature. Buckmaster was promoted in November 2000 to CEO.
The website increased into nine more US cities in 2000, 4 in 2001 and 2002 each, and 14 in 2003. Craigslist began charging $25 on August 1, 2004, to post job openings on Los Angeles and the New York pages. On the same day, they added a new section called Gigs, where low-cost and volunteer jobs can be posted free.
The site helps more than 20 billion page views monthly, placing it in 72nd place overall among websites globally and 11th place overall among websites in the United States (per Alexa.com on June 28, 2016), with over 49.4 million unique visitors monthly in the US alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010). With over 80 million unique classified ads each month, Craigslist is the best classifieds service in any medium. The site gets more than 2 million new job listings each month, obtaining it one of the top job boards in the world.
With millions of new listings every month, Craigslist also dominates the US rental housing market. The 23 largest cities in the US recorded on the Craigslist home page collectively get more than 300,000 postings daily just in the “housing” and “for sale” sections as of October 2011. The classified ads range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements to personal ads. In 2009, Craigslist worked with a staff of 28 people.
In March 2008, Craigslist supported Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese as the first non-English languages. As of August 9, 2012, more than areas in 70 countries and 700 cities had Craigslist sites. Some Craigslist sites reach large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas, for example, the Colorado Western Slope, the U.S. states of Wyoming and Delaware, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the California Gold Country are among the locations with their own Craigslist sites.
Personal life
Craig Newmark splits his time between the West Village in New York City and San Francisco’s Cole Valley. Newmark calls himself as a secular Jew, non-practicing, joking that his rabbi was the late singer Leonard Cohen. In December 2012, Newmark married Eileen Whelpley.
Net worth
In May 2017, Forbes figured that Newmark’s net worth is at least $1.3 billion based on his ownership of at least 42% of Craigslist.