Craigslist Founder Inside Top 10 of Web's Most Important

Craig Newmark beats out eBay's Whitmen, Yahoo brass on PC World List

When it comes to what's important to the editors of PC World, creativity and utility seem to trump P&L. The magazine's list of the web's most important people puts some of the web's most creative and innovative maestros ahead of many of the captains of Internet industry.

As the magazine states in its online edition:

"At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus."

Of interest to you, the auction fan and/or collector, may be where the magazine ranks the folks who allow you to click your mouse for fun and profit. One of our heroes, Craig Newmark (pictured), who founded the aforementioned Craigslist and has managed to keep it true to his humble vision, comes in at #7.

This puts Newmark (who has beaten back the Netage zeitgeist by refusing all but the most meager remuneration for a site that PC World claims racked up over 14 million page views in December) behind the chart-topping Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin - the troika at the helm of Google. Apple's Steve Jobs is second. However, Newmark ranks ahead of eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who makes the list at #28.

Oddly, two men who made the kind of gazillions eschewed by Newmark, Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they also created KaZaA), also come in ahead of Whitman, even though (or because) eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion last year.

Among others whose companies have stakes in ATR's world, Amazon's Jeff Bezos is at #24 and Jerry Yang, David Filo and Terry Semel of Yahoo (which is still looking for traction for its auction endeavor) are at #19.

(Photo from craiglist.com)