
17. Craiglist
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craiglist, devised an email distribution catalog as a result of his desire for promoting local events. He was adjusting to San Francisco, started experimenting with an email directory for popularizing local happenings. In turn, Craig began emailing the distribution list to his near and dear ones. Word-of-mouth publicity hugely fueled the popularity of the listing, eventually leading to a burgeoning of posts and subscribers. Newmark was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that people were not only posting social events because of his efforts.
Newmark added a separate jobs index to the listing to boost its versatility, and subsequently, demand for adding more categories proliferated. Once Craiglist was interfaced with the world’s vast web network, it was registered as craiglist.org, and the site was hosted in 1996. Currently, Craiglist is one of the leading classified ads portals in the US due to its worldwide scope. People in more than 70 countries take advantage of Craiglist due to its many helpful avenues, and those living in a metropolis can focus on a particular city area.
Craiglist doesn’t need to publish financial statements as the firm is a private entity. Nevertheless, it is alleged that Craiglist’s net worth was much more than $1 billion in 2019 thanks to its successes. Craig bequeathed nearly $20 million to a media entity in 2019 that amply proved his philanthropic tendencies as a result.