H ooking up with Jim Buckmaster turns out to be easy. Unlike the millions who meet through the classified listings of Craigslist. At the West End private members' club where we are due to meet, all it takes is the mention of his name at reception to catch the eye of the gangling, rather shy-looking man browsing an iPad further along the desk.
Not that it would be simple for Buckmaster, at 6ft 7in tall, to blend into the background at the best of times. Yet the chief executive of the world's biggest classified listings website has a reputation for elusiveness. Interviews are rare and, I've been warned, can be tough going. But today he is on good form, casually dressed in jeans and a white shirt, fresh off the back of a couple of days' break in Barcelona.
November will mark his 11th year in charge of Craigslist, prominent in the minds of many for hastening the demise of local newspapers by destroying the print classified advertising market. Seasoned observers of Craigslist will already be familiar with the company's unusual modus operandi and even more startling metrics. It is the 11th most popular site in the United States and 37th globally, with 65 million unique users every month viewing 24bn pages according to Google.
The selective charges, Buckmaster insists, are merely in response to user demand to improve the quality of the listings, apart from the higher San Francisco fees imposed to cover the running costs of the business, which employs just 32 people.
Any extra profit accrued, he says, is an unintended secondary consequence. Both Buckmaster and Craig Newmark, the site's founder, who these days has a "semi-retired" customer service role, see the business in mainly social, rather than financial terms. To us that's a pretty important offering. We've had emails from people who've pretty much assembled their entire lives on the site.
