> send one hundred or more paid lobbyists to DC.
With what money? Not only does Craigslist not really have any profitable business interests to protect, but they don't have the money to do that even if they wanted to.
With what money? Not only does Craigslist not really have any profitable business interests to protect, but they don't have the money to do that even if they wanted to.
Craigslist makes money but this money is minimal compared to the amount of money its taking from the billion-dollar newspaper industry.
Sending 100+ lobbyists to Washington would cost at least a good chunk of the ~$100 million/year that craigslist makes. It's reasonable to argue that it would make no sense to do this.
Rather than viewing a modest annual expense of $20 million on lobbyists and branding, look at it as protection money that enables the revenue stream to continue and to grow. If the choice comes down to either shutting down all of Craigslist because they can't possibly moderate every post after hookers are using their freedom of speech to posti ads in every category, or paying lobbyists to keep a lid on things from DC and thereby continue the operations, then the arithmetic shows CL loses more if they don't pay the lobbyists.
I loathe the entire DC lobbyist racket as much as the next guy, and it truly is the scourge of our democracy, but it works! Otherwise why else would all of corporate America spend such lavish amounts on lobbying?
But like bank robbers who foolishly think they wouldn't get caught on the 10th robbery, or a gambler playing martingale double or nothing all night, they fucked up. Craig should have pried open his fat ass wallet and toss millions of pocket change towards lobbying, branding, PR and advertising many, many years ago. Instead, they let their enemies, the media itself, define their brand and PR, and they lost control of the message, the agenda and the way they are presented to the mass public.
But Craig is apparently too hung up on his neo-hippy ideals of keeping Craigslist anti-corporate to realize that if he doesn't sink to the same dirty corporate warfare as the enemy, then they'll stab him in the back eventually. All they need is one good shot, and it's just a matter of time. I don't really get how a privately held $100 million/yr corporation is "anti-corporate." At that point it's just folly and self-delusion, he should have seen this storm cloud brewing miles away and years ago, and prepared for it to hit. Such as when Ebay tried to steal the company years ago. Too late now—say buh-bye to that $36 million a year in revenues from adult ads! Ouch!
I'm an unabashed Craiglist hater simply because he completely fucked up and missed the boat and failed us developers by not transforming the most popular and best single Internet site of high signal/noise anonymous contact into the best open mashup API of real-time, localized, semantic data. And this souped up mashup data API didn't have to be all corporatified either—Craig could have kept it hippy! Like Twitter! CL would only need to lift their pinky finger to instantly defeat the hundreds of millions invested in data mashup startups, Google, FB, AT&T, Ebay, etc who are trying to pin the market which CL dominates. Again, I see the opportunity cost—by CL not chasing change, we the users of the Internet have now lost more than we've gained from the potential of CL as force for good, community and the overall power of the Internet. I suppose my idealism is even purer than Craig's. :) At the very least, CL can stop sending C&D orders and DMCA takedowns to small websites scraping their data.
I believe a data API like this would have caused Craigslist to become even bigger and more unstoppable. Craig, Jim and whoever pulls the the strings are lazy, unimaginative fucktards who deserve to be dethroned so we, the Internet, can have a new winner in the next round of King-of-the-Hill: Winner Takes All Internet Edition. :)
Not only has CL failed to innovate, it actively goes after and shuts down third parties who do interesting things with CL data. :(
Notably section 3, "CONTENT," and the 2nd paragraph of section 14, "PROPRIETARY RIGHTS," in which they explicitly disclaim ownership: "Although craigslist does not claim ownership of content that its users post..."
now if only we could go get everyone who posted listings to sign off on allowing us access their data we could build an API in no time.
Then CL could just offer a bare-bones, REST, read-only firehose API to access those posts. Just like how Twitter does it. This entire project would probably take the developers at CL a month to roll out into prod. Hell, knowing how software shops work, they probably already have 3 private internal versions of it that were shelved by the ignorant, risk-averse management who only fear change and don't know how to tread water in the meandering river of technology and Internet society.
Wild idea for the Techcrunch rumor mill in 2011: it's too bad Twitter doesn't buy or merge with CL, and in absorbing CL, make them be more open and community-centric.
Perhaps CL will see the light and open up an API, as the newspapers get more desperate and turn up the dial on the hate. CL is going to need to show off something, anything to take the spot light off themselves before the wolves rush in now that they're injured & bleeding.
Look, Craigslist doesn't want an api.
Its their software and its that simple
People need to get over it or ... you know ... go build their own classifieds listing service or something.