Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist - the free social networking and classifieds Web site, is not interested in selling out. Its a trend that most success websites are being sold or are on verge of getting purchased, recently MySpace was valued approx $15 billion.

Craig was found stating this at Picnic ‘06 Cross Media Week conference. This was after the RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan said MySpace could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of its parent company, News Corp.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It now boasts more than 90 million active users, against 10 million monthly users of craigslist. Craigslist, despite its no-frills layout, gets more than four billion page views per month with just 22 employees. This is a successful business for sure.

Measured as a proportion of the number of employees, it claims to rank seventh amongst English language sites, behind Yahoo, AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Google, eBay and News Corp. Newmark was found saying that raising the money to subsequently give it away to good causes also did not interest him.

Craigslist is 25 percent owned by eBay after one of the shareholders who helped to set up the site in the 1990s sold his stake in 2004. Newmark declines to specify exactly who owns the remaining shares.

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