Details Slowly Emerging in Newmark-Jarvis Venture

By: Jay DeFoore Details are slowly starting to crystallize around the online news venture Craigslist founder Craig Newmark mentioned last week at an Oxford University symposium.

Blogger Jeff Jarvis explained that the project Newmark is involved in as an angel investor is actually the one he signed on with some months ago. At his Buzzmachine blog today, Jarvis pointed readers to a post he made back in May when he announced his departure from Advance.net: "I will act as editor in chief of a new news start-up founded by Upendra Shardanand (ex Firefly, Microsoft Passport, AOL, and Time Warner) and a sterling team."

Jarvis' latest post says the project is still in development and those involved are not ready to talk about it in any detail. But he reveals: "Our goal is to create a platform to organize the world's news using the best of technology, community, and editors. We see an explosion of interest in and coverage of news from incredibly varied sources around the world and see a need around that.

"We plan to have a beta in the spring. And as I've blogged before, we will be looking for talent in various areas; we're not ready to take on more folks yet but I'll let you know when we are. And of course, we'll post the jobs on Craigslist!"

In a separate e-mail to E&P, Newmark took exception to the headline of an earlier E&P article suggesting that in his Oxford talk he had slammed U.S. media when he said "the American public has lost a lot of trust in conventional newspaper mechanisms."

"I've been consistently supportive of newspapers, in this talk and others," Newmark wrote via e-mail. At his own blog, Newmark stated that the new venture is "intended to complement, preserve, and grow existing media."

Newmark's moves are followed closely by the newspaper industry largely because of the threat the free classifieds business model presents. In its report on Newmark's Oxford speech, the British newspaper the Guardian wrote that Craigslist has taken $50 million out of the San Francisco classified ad market alone. And the site is not showing any signs of slowing down.

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that online classified ad sites as a whole had more than 26 million unique visitors in September 2005, up 80% over the previous September. The Craigslist cluster of sites were the most popular, drawing close to 9 million unique visitors that month, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.

Below is the data from the study:

Classified Sites Sept. 2004 vs. Sept. 2005
Unique Visitors (000)

	Sept-04	Sept-05	% Change
Total Internet :: Total Audience	158,042	169,232	7
Classifieds	14,626	25,349	80
Craigslist.org	3,425	8,764	156
Trader Publishing Company	4,305	8,180	90
Cars.com	2,767	3,749	35
Apartments.com	1,560	2,102	35
Abracat Property	1,364	959	-30
Homescape.com	596	826	39
Puppydogweb.com	590	799	35
Livedeal.com	767	797	4
Tribe Networks, Inc.	N/A	721	N/A
RegionalHelpWanted.com Sites	964	685	-29
Yahoo! Classifieds	979	573	-42
USCity.net	199	426	113
BackPage.com	N/A	417	N/A
MySPace Classifieds	N/A	417	N/A
Hoobly.com	221	388	75

Source: comScore Media Metrix, September 2005