History of Craigslist
The history of Craigslist actually starts in 1995, something that is somewhat evident by the very simplistic design that the website actually has. There are three stages in the history of Craigslist. The first is the pre-web history of Craigslist. The second is the pre-international history of Craigslist. The third is the international or modern history of Craigslist.In the first act of the Craigslist history, the service was not a site and it was 1995. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, actually had it as an e-mail list of people to which he could send information about events taking place in the bay area of San Francisco. This part of the Craigslist history actually only lasted for about one year before Craigslist made the move onto the internet in the middle of 1996.
After this part of the history had played itself out, Craigslist started a history of expansion. For the first three years of its online internet existence however, it did not really have that much going outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was only after 1999 when Craigslist was incorporated into being a for-profit company that was privately held that they started expanding. Nine cities came online with Craigslist sites in 2000, four in 2001, four in 2002 and a whopping 14 in 2003.
It was not soon after that period of time that Craigslist started expanding into international markets. Fast forward through international expansion to the year 2009 and you will find that Craigslist has websites representing nearly 600 different cities that are spread out across 50 different countries. It has truly become an international online free classifieds site and easily the biggest of its kind.
According to the current internet rankings at Alexa, Craigslist is responsible for getting an amazing twenty billion page views each month. That is good enough to crack the top 25 worldwide and the top ten in the United States. Its only source of income comes from people placing ads for jobs for money, with amounts from $10 to $75 depending on which Craigslist site is going to be getting the ad. Even with that source of income however, Craigslist still makes in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in a single calendar year.