"Craigslist's content is not at all bandwidth intensive--all light text, no computation or transactive processing like eBay or Google--so this should keep its c

"Craigslist's content is not at all bandwidth intensive--all light text, no computation or transactive processing like eBay or Google--so this should keep its costs well below those of other huge global sites. Let's call it $50 million a year. (This is probably high--grateful for any help in refining)." What is he smoking? Sure they have a lot of page views, but man, you can do a lot for $50 million a year. Craigslist's site is as bare as it could be. All static html, that is probably just generated using whatever scripting language it wants. I'm there is some engineering challenges and that they go through a good bit of bandwidth, but i mean, I feel like this guy is off by like an order of magnitude. Now, I don't know squat about serious big iron servers and doing stuff that large, but its definitely not $50million to run it. A guy in the site's comments puts the yearly cost at $1 million and he even over-estimates a bit in my book. Also, all these analysts always speculate about how much money craigslist could make if they charged for all job postings and ads. As soon as they started charging for anything more than what they do they would probably get an order of magnitude less postings. Then they would just another monster.com/careerbuilder.com/etc crappy clone. Whats great now is that people can post whatever they want for free, with the few exceptions that help pay for it all (and still probably make Craig rich). The author obviously didn't study engineering or physics because his back-of-the-envelope calculations suck.