Users hope eBay's stake won't ruin Craigslist

WASHINGTON -- Ernie Miller, 38, offers a telling clue as to how www.craigslist.org became the Internet's go-to place to solve life's vexing problems.

He posted a note on the website's bulletin boards a few weeks ago, seeking people willing to let him test his stand-up comic routine at their events for free. He got half a dozen e-mail replies, including an offer to perform at a Christmas party.

''I would say I have had a better response from Craigslist than from any other attempt at promotion," said Miller, a suburban software developer who described himself as ''fairly new to stand-up."

Miller is among the growing number of people who are using Craigslist, a freewheeling Internet marketplace, to fulfill their varied needs. In 1995, computer specialist Craig Newmark founded the site, which evolved from a simple e-mail list he created to communicate with friends in the San Francisco area. Craigslist now has sites to serve 45 urban areas.

In the Washington area, for example, residents in recent weeks have used Craigslist not only to find jobs and housing but to get rid of a dental chair cluttering a garage, to hunt for long-lost childhood pals in one suburb and find a Korean tutor in another, and to locate a justice of the peace to perform a wedding in French and English.

Part of the site's appeal is that it still feels like the early days of the Web, with a text-only design and simple publishing tools.

But users fear this could change after the recent announcement that eBay, one of the giants of Internet commerce, has bought a 25 percent stake in the tiny company for an undisclosed sum

Newmark insists that such worries are unfounded. ''If anything, all this questioning is just reinforcing our sense of our current mission," he said.

For starters, Craigslist lets people post most stuff free. It charges employers in the San Francisco Bay area $75 to list job openings, and this month added a $25 fee for job listings in New York and Los Angeles. The company says it is profitable but does not disclose its financial information.

According to the company, people post more than 2.5 million classified ads and more than 100,000 jobs to the network each month.

Chief executive Jim Buckmaster said the firm does not plan to collect fees in other categories, except possibly for apartment rentals in New York City. Eventually it will charge for job listings in other cities, but not until a particular market has a critical mass of job seekers.

For its part, eBay is looking for insights into the free-form listing model that Craigslist popularized, in which people trade privately by whatever rules they choose. It differs sharply from the rules-heavy auction and fixed-price formats eBay offers. ''We want to learn more about the traditional classified-style business online," said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.

More broadly, the eBay deal highlights how hungrily the Internet's commercial heavyweights are eyeing the gigantic market for local commerce.

Industry analysts say the newspaper industry is running scared, since classified revenue accounts for a big share of its revenue -- and a lot of job advertising has already migrated online.

But Gordon Borrell, a media consultant in Portsmouth, Va., does not consider Craigslist a threat to newspapers, even though he agrees that classified ads are moving to the Web. Borrell on one recent day counted the local jobs offered on Craigslist and compared them with those available at the websites of newspapers in several cities; he found the newspaper sites had nearly 10 times as many listings. ''When people are looking for a job, they want to go to the place with the most jobs," he said.