"Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The stake was purchased from a former craigslist employee who first contacted eBay with the proposed sale, craigslist officials said."

Newmark, a former IBM programmer, founded craigslist in 1995 as a roundup of local events in San Francisco, but the bare-bones site fast became a popular online destination and has branched out to 45 cities in North America and Europe, with dozens more posted to a waiting list.

Each month, craigslist posts more than 2.5 million classified ads and more than 100,000 new job listings, and gets more than 1 billion page views and 5 million unique visitors per month, craigslist officials said.

EBay said it doesn't expect its investment in craigslist to affect financial guidance for the third quarter of fiscal 2004. "