He's saying making it a buck will make CL a lot of money.
OP is saying that may not happen. People might move to another classifieds website in mass. CL might end up making a lot less money because less traffic = less price for paid sections of their site(ie. job sections in certain cities).
I think he's wrong about it though. Honestly, craigslist hasn't failed me much. I rarely get spam or ads. When I need to sell something, it has always worked out. Part of the wonder of craigslist is that everyone has access to it. If they charged to post, some people wouldn't pay, and the community would suffer
Yeah I saw his post more as a HUGE hypothetical fantasy.
The premise of it is based on making money. While that is usually the end pursued by most commercial ventures, Craig Newmark has made it abundantly clear that optimizing money is never the goal at Craigslist.
That's not what I read it as. I think the key paragraph is:
Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.
Especially the last line. By charging a small amount, you remove the ability to scale to infinity. I would charge far less than a dollar per ad, though.
It seems unlikely that classified ad traffic drives job-hunting traffic. Does someone who is looking for a used fish tank stumble across an ad for an IT professional?
OP is saying that may not happen. People might move to another classifieds website in mass. CL might end up making a lot less money because less traffic = less price for paid sections of their site(ie. job sections in certain cities).