Craigslist founder says he won't cash in

Thu Sep 28, 9:15 AM ET

The founder of craigslist, the free social networking and classifieds Web site, said on Thursday he is not interested in selling out, a few hours after social networking site MySpace was valued at $15 billion.

"Who needs the money? We don't really care," Craig Newmark said in an interview at the Picnic '06 Cross Media Week conference here.

"If you're living comfortably, what's the point of having more?" Newmark said.

Just a few hours earlier, RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan said MySpace could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of its parent company, News Corp.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It now boasts more than 90 million active users, against 10 million monthly users of craigslist.

Craigslist, despite its no-frills layout, gets more than four billion page views per month with just 22 employees.

Measured as a proportion of the number of employees, it claims to rank seventh amongst English language sites, behind Yahoo, AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Google, eBay and News Corp.

Newmark said raising the money to subsequently give it away to good causes also did not interest him.

"Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming," he said, adding that he and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster agree on not cashing in.

"We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they're not any the happier. They also need bodyguards," he said.

Craigslist is 25 percent owned by eBay after one of the shareholders who helped to set up the site in the 1990s sold his stake in 2004. Newmark declines to specify exactly who owns the remaining shares.