herdrick:

Source? And are those the company's profits, or what the founder, Craig Newmark, has taken out of the company's profits since its founding 17-18 years ago? Does that include his salary, or only his pro-rata share of distributions to all shareholders, or both?

Let's assume for a moment that this is the total amount of money he's received from the company since inception. It's a relatively paltry amount of money for a company with that kind of reach. Compare the "$30 million" you say he has earned cumulatively over nearly two decades to the billions or hundreds of millions of dollars earned by the founders of most web companies that have achieved similar scale.

Moreover, that figure is comparable to what CEOs of large non-profit organizations make per year. Compare $30 million over 17-18 years, or around $1.7 million per year, to the figures quoted in this article: http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2011/09/slideshow-who...

By all accounts, Craigslist behaves a lot more like a non-profit organization than as a for-profit corporation.

Taken over a decade, that number is 1/225th of a single quarter of Facebook's operating cost.

Craigslist occupies what should be one of the most lucrative pieces of real estate on the entire Internet. With numbers like that, you're making the parent commenter's point for them.

I have no idea if that number is accurate, but $30 million over a decade where the site has absolutely dominated its industry seems like a pittance.

How many billions of dollars were spent on classified ads before Craigslist? Capturing 0.0001% of the value in a market is a far cry is 'relatively non-commercial' in my opinion.