Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic

They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI

I mean take credit cards for example. You have Visa and Mastercard with the majority of the market. Then you have American Express and Discover that have a tiny portion.

That's it. And that's more or less worldwide.

You'd think since the coming of the internet, we'd have at least some competition in this space. Just imagine how much money there is, in join Mastercard/Visa as a top 3 credit card.

Square is a little lower down the chain, so the main thing they are giving here is passing through their huge savings down the pipeline. But even then it's not 100%.

Their basic pricing is 2.75%. So essentially you need to sell $10,000 worth of stuff before you start profiting off the $275/mo...and you only have until $20,000 before you go up to the regular 2.75% pricing.

And 2.75% is pretty high...for credit card processing.

The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...

So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.

Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents

So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.

We aren't telling you that you can't do X...but Article 294-984b, section 49a states that doing X is a $50,000 fine.

My guess is that you'll find similar people on Digg's and News.me boards. And this was just a way to a) write off Digg as a permanent loss off the books and b) transfer those assets cheaply to the other company, which might boost them from being a loser to being a winner

Noone sells Digg for $500K...not unless they are millions and millions in debt

on Amazon you just search, compare, read reviews and click buy.

with brick and mortar stores, you have to drive to the store, park, then roam the store to find what you are looking for, then hope that they have it in stock before you buy, then drive back home. Even a small purchase ends up costing you an hour of your time.

and for large purchases almost always you have to wait 20-30 for the store associate to bring out what you want to buy...and you have to deal with a sales pitch for an extended warranty

if he considers that kind of life "failure", he is going to lead a very depressed life unless he wins a few lotteries

that's fine for a startup...but for a company that has IPOed it's just plain sad.

but that's not what this is about...it's about people complaining that criagslist isn't allowing them to make money from craigslist brand.

And I'd imagine cost is also an issue. With your own sales team you can just hire people to work on commission...and here you not only have to hire a sales team...but also include a healthy profit margin for Elastic.

their service is 100% dependent on Craigslist so they'd have trouble selling to anyone else