You know that site where you bid on and bought your vintage designer duds? That Thundercats lunchbox? Or those garish home accents your girlfriend has all over her apartment? It seems that they were purchased from a media company. At least according to Simon Dumenco at AdAge:
There's actually another company that does something very much like what eBay does -- and, curiously, nobody hesitates to think of it as a media company. Like eBay, Craigslist is all about maintaining a giant, searchable database of listings. It brings buyers and sellers together (it also, famously, brings other parties, like the oversexed and the lonely-hearted, together, but I digress). Of course, it does so, mostly, without extracting fees, because of the admirable sociopolitical sensibilities of its founder, Craig Newmark. Oddly, Newmark regularly gets slammed for single-handedly killing the newspaper classified-ad business, even though eBay, founded in 1995, is four years older (and vastly more profitable) than Craigslist.