There’s a bird in Craig Newmark’s house. The big brown finch has flown in and is trying to escape through the glass of the french doors. Newmark pads across the kitchen and ushers the bird out unharmed. “That’s one I haven’t seen before,” he says, reaching for his bird guides. “I think it was a female.” Newmark likes birds. His balconied deck backs onto a steep, wooded slope. He points out dark-eyed juncos, another type of songbird. We see hummingbirds in the trees. “There are wild parrots around here somewhere but I haven’t seen them yet,” he says.
It’s been a couple of months since Newmark moved into the “shack”, as he calls his wood-panelled home in San Francisco, and it doesn’t feel lived in yet. There’s a safe, good taste to it.
A man is fixing his slate fireplace, the walls are a muted pistachio, the furniture is mainly brown, there’s a 50in plasma-screen TV. We could be in a hotel lobby. But the real Newmark is starting to poke through – and he’s a nerd. When the phone rings it says: “Craig, there is a call for you; Craig, there is a call for you.” His mobile phone plays the theme from Monty Python. On the wall is a poster for the film Blade Runner. There’s a lot of sci-fi on the bookshelves. Homer Simpson’s yellow head sits on the banister.
Newmark is the founder of the phenomenally successful online classified-advertising site Craigslist. He’s short, awkward, pudgy, balding and 53. Newmark calls his girlfriend the Girlfriend, as if he’s never had one before. (“I got the Girlfriend tickets for that show, which gave the Boyfriend good Boyfriend points,” he confides.) Eileen Whelpley, aka the Girlfriend, is a technical designer for Gap and a talented flamenco dancer. She hates being called the Girlfriend and is unafraid to tell Newmark so – or me. She insists her correct name is used in this piece.
It’s hard to believe that this bird-spotting, henpecked man is giving media moguls nightmares. He is a “real menace” to the newspaper industry, according to a report by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Nor does he seem the sort to be running a site that has become a noughties knocking shop, empowering a new generation of swingers to engage in acts of moral turpitude. And yet Newmark is all this and more. He’s an accidental revolutionary and he’s loving every minute of it.
Craigslist had a low-key beginning. In 1985, Newmark, then an 18-year veteran of IBM, started the site in San Francisco to keep his friends informed about local events. As it grew, he added jobs, flats for rent, bikes for sale, lonely hearts: all the classified ads that used to be placed – for a fee – in the backs of newspapers. Today the website is used by more than 10m people a month. It attracts 8m new ads a month, including 300,000 job listings, and is now in 35 countries, including Britain and Ireland, where it has sites for cities including London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Dublin.
Its users come to the site to discuss anything from politics to pet food. They also come looking for casual sex. Their adverts range from the sweet – a London man looking for a dining companion says “we can always forgo pudding for a stroll in the park if we fancy it” – to postings so salacious that no detail is suitable for a family newspaper. Sex on the site attracts most of the headlines – and brickbats from self-appointed moral guardians – but it’s the job ads and for-sales that get most of the traffic.
Newmark’s typical day starts at home, monitoring Craigslist’s message boards and advertising postings from his home office. He roots out some real-estate agents in New York who have put their listings in the fee-free section. He deletes some offensive postings about cats in one of the website’s discussion boards. He describes his main job as “customer service”. “I like to be in contact with what’s going on,” he says. “A lot of chief executives or higher political officials are surrounded by people who filter things so much that they have no idea of what is really happening.”
On his own, Newmark can’t hope to do anything but scratch the surface of Craigslist’s ever-expanding universe. And anyway, as he proudly points out, the site is largely self-policing. Craigslist’s users root out miscreants – sneaky real-estate brokers, serial fraudsters, prostitutes posting in the casual-encounters section (like the majority of the ads, sex is free on Craigslist). The users recruit customers by telling their friends about the site; they tell their friends, and so on and so on. Beyond a bit of customer service and some public appearances, Craigslist doesn’t really need Craig. But Craig needs Craigslist.
Leonard Cohen stares balefully from a photo on Newmark’s office. “Take this longing from my tongue,” reads the song lyric quoted beneath it. There is another photograph of the singer in his monk’s robes in Newmark’s home. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Zen monk at the monastery not far from Newmark’s home. “He’s the nearest thing to a rabbi I have,” says Newmark.
Newmark shares his office with Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive. It’s a scruffy room in a house next to a 24-hour doughnut shop in a glamour-free area of San Francisco. There is a pile of CDs on a desk – Nick Drake, Joss Stone, the Pixies, Cat Power – and books, including The Dash Diet for Hypertension. A newspaper advert on the wall promises to teach you “How to Start a Successful Online Business in 24 Hours”.
Physically, the pair are a classic comedy double act. At 6ft 7in, Buckmaster is a foot taller than Newmark. He’s younger, 43, more worldly, less awkward, cooler. But they seem to be growing more alike. Buckmaster has been a bird-watcher for years, and Newmark’s interest is relatively recent. They have his-and-his goatee beards, but Newmark had his first. Six years ago, Buckmaster – a medical-school dropout with a degree in biochemistry – posted his CV on Craigslist, and Newmark saw it and hired him. “Things didn’t really come together until Jim joined,” says Newmark. “I’m not much of a manager, really, and, for me, doing customer service is the right thing on a whole bunch of levels.” Buckmaster does the hiring and firing, gets stroppy when it’s needed, makes the place tick. Craig is Craig.
Theirs is a marriage grounded in similar beliefs. The primary one is that Craigslist is a public service as much as a private company. For Newmark and Buckmaster, the internet has a higher calling than money-making. It’s a view many shared at the start of the dotcom revolution. But one by one, Craigslist’s contemporaries at firms like eBay and Google have joined the rat race and made billions. The Craigslist duo could easily join the dotcom rich list if they chose to sell the company. The idea is anathema to them.
