eBay has opened a US version of its classifieds site Kijiji.
Kijiji has previously been available in Canada as well as parts of Europe and Asia, and is a direct competitor to Craigslist.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Kijiji is immediately available in 220 cities in all 50 US states. Like Craigslist, advertising is free with eBay looking at ways of charging sellers for display ads or premium services at a later date.
eBay bought 25% of Craigslist in 2004 and retains that shareholding today.
Despite, or perhaps because of its ugly interface, Craigslist has been an enormous success in the United States, although notably not nearly as much elsewhere. eBay is trying to tackle a 500 ton gorilla with a product that would appear to be nothing more that a pretty looking Craigslist clone, so it will be a hard task. Then again eBay certainly has the strength, marketing skills and capital to call game on.
That URL looks like a mess in the address bar. That’s all I’ve got.
How is it game on when Ebay owns 25% of craigslist?
ryan
the site competes directly with Craiglist…apparently although eBay owns 25% of craiglist they have no control over the company + Kijiji can only be targeted at one thing (Craiglist itself). This isn’t a complementary service to Craiglist after all
All the categories (in my area) have no ads. The site doesn’t tell you that which is rather annoying.
Craigslist was careful not expand geographically until they were ready and had built up enough interest through word-of-mouth. Considering eBay owns x% of craigslist, I’m surprised they didn’t follow suit.
With kijiji, you get an ajax usa map, but what’s the point of zooming into a desert?
Craig vs. Jeff : Round 1
All I can say is this is here just in time for me to sell my Mosquito Magnet. I thought about Craigslist but wow. that interface is bad.
the other company this competes against besides craigslist: eBay. Who wants to sell on ebay if there is a free, workable classifieds solution?
I saw autorickshaws in Bombay(India) sporting kijiji’s logo summer of last year.
The name should get mega bonus points for its suckiness.
i know people like cute web2 names, but this one – kijiji, is a visual tongue twister
Future 2010
—————————–
Craig will win
eBay/ kiJiJi will lose
Craig has the hearts of the community
Ebay has Meg Whitman
The game is to get the other 75% of Craigslist. Bulid or buy is the question and when they don’t want to sell the other 75% you must build… It is a game to get it, as they need they continued growth..M
Grr… just as we begin development on listobo.com, too.
Lawrence
I fully agree (on the name side that is).
craigslist is simple and works well. A pretty interface doesn’t make a site good. Plus Kijiji is just an awful name
No erotic services and men posing as women seeking men. And free job postings. I’m all for some healthy competition.
@1 – Yodel:
That’s typical ebay’s way of setting up URL.
@12 – James Thomas:
Early players in the market do not always win. Analyze your competitors, then come up with cool features that can capture the audience. Be sure to ‘techcrunch’ it when it launches.
This is how you know it’s not being used:
Sorry, but there are no Ads in Men seeking women
I think that Craigslist’s founder shouldn’t have sold his stake to eBay. Now eBay can compete with a clone and not risk ‘copyright’ or ‘passing off’ litigation through having its 25% stake in the would-be plaintiff (Craigslist). So, if this reasoning is correct, then eBay owning a part of its competition could be the death-knell to Craigslist. However, the name Kijiji is really bad and Craigslist has so much momentum…
that’s a pretty awful name.
CL doesn’t care because they don’t compete period. they are not competitive. they barely care about monetizing the site let alone what others are doing. No game here. No story. Nothing. CL is a sleeping giant that doesn’t care to wake and play. GAME ON…. NOT.
Would be funny to see Craig and his faux humbleness shaken a bit. I admire him for standing firm for his beliefs and all but the man himself is an arse. The CEO though is a very cool guy (and so is his wife) so Jim if you’re listening and ever want a job…..
same as the other guy, all categories seem dead. Why use this, when I can go to craigslist that has a ton more people?
There’s a difference between an ugly site and a minimal site. craigslist is a minimal site, and thus it works everywhere and for everyone predictably with the least amount of fluff that is actually necessary. Ugly sites, well, remember geocities? Or you could browse myspace for a few minutes to find a truly ugly site that is entirely unusable because of bad font selection, bad color selection, noisy backgrounds, etc. In other words, the “I just found out about this HTML thing” sites are the ones that are ugly. It’s really easy to attack craigslist on being “ugly” because they are proof that you don’t need to pay some expensive designers to put rounded corners and pastel colors on your site, but you do need to realize what’s most important, the information and content, and that needs to be accessible and readable.
Compare craigslist.com to timecube.com.
It’s an ugly CL ripoff without the sex ads. It’s like eBay for youngsters to get ‘em hooked for later in life.
Maybe Craig & Co. will slap them with a copyright infringement suit
Definitely no game on. Its not the interface that needs changing, its the service in general. I’ve got something in the works. Sorry Craigslit/Ebay.
It’s a good time for eBay to do this, GoogleBase can be used as an API source for CL-style classified sites, see
http://verkoops.com/
Flickr + Google Base + Google Maps + Yahoo Maps
I used to use Craiglist through Listpic.com but Listpic was banned.
http://qurl.co.uk/6iyh
Also Facebook now has classifieds:
http://qurl.co.uk/7oq4
It’s a good time for eBay to do this, GoogleBase can be used as an API source for CL-style classified sites, see
verkoops.com/
Flickr + Google Base + Google Maps + Yahoo Maps
I used to use Craiglist through Listpic.com but Listpic was banned.
qurl.co.uk/6iyh
Also Facebook now has classifieds:
qurl.co.uk/7oq4
eBay is in for a rude awakening. Their time is almost up.
Ebay is not in for a rude awakening. Their profits were up $150 million this year despite investor woes. Paypal (439 million this year), Skype (when more cities go wi-fi), Rent.com, and this new site are all doing well for them. Kijiji is already doing great outside the states and Ebay probably understands that there is room for two in the market, as long as one is cleaner than the other and offers some sort of niche ( Myspace compared to Facebook). Verkoops.com sucks and every other competitor that is out there besides Edgeio, which is a very cool idea and another niche that could potentially last. I don’t like Ebay these days either, but their core business will continue to decline, yet provide promising revenues for funding future aquisitions because millions are dependant and will be dependant on Ebay for sales for the next 10 years (businesses, which survive on ebay for sales and is eventually what is crippling their core business). Those are my unbiased thoughts.
Jason
1DaySports.com
i’m sure that #25 jason has something great in the works, but i’m definitely thinking this thing might pan out.
1. ebay has a huge buyer and seller base to promote this with
2. ebay has been great at building an ecosystem of partners (small and big) that use their service
3. ebay doesn’t need to make money off this in the short-term, so no financial pressure (of course, craigslist isn’t into making money either. but having their $20M in job posting revenue at risk has to make someone nervous)
4. ebay has a very good developer program with an API that this service could use. getting data in and out efficiently will be huge.
5. site performance – now we’ll have to see how it performs when there’s more activity/content there, but the site is ultra-quick. i’ve seen a whole set of sites get techCrunch’ed. operationally, ebay knows how to run fast. it’s hard to compare UI of one vs. the other. i personally find both of them real easy to post.
@28, totally agree. Edgeio rocks. May not be around for EBay to pay up and buy if they don’t jump on it asap. We aren’t the only folks who see the value.
I’m not sure what Kijiji offers other than a marginally slicker interface. Cool technology isn’t a substitute for the reach and size of network and most people put up with the clunky, minimalist Craigslist interface because of the reach. Microsoft Live Expo and Base have been in this arena for some time, without making a huge impact, as have many upstarts (edgio etc.)
I don’t agree that craigslist has an ugly interface. In fact it’s interface is better and more usable than ebay’s or kijiji’s.
Also, kijiji will be a competetion to craigslist as much as it will be to eBay. Why pay eBay to list your items for sale when you can list them free at Kijiji, right?
Craigslist brand value and recognotion is right up there with amazon, myspace, google, ebay, etc. But for them, it seems, it’s never about the money, as they’re “wasting” billions of page views without plastering ads all over and leaving money at the table.
In fact, craigslist is probably easiest website to duplicate; a simple classified posting script will do the job. Do you know any real rival to them after all these years? I don’t.
It seems conventional wisdom is you must maximize revenue opportunity or die.
Doesn’t the craigslist strategy of keeping it cheap give them a competitive advantage? A potential competitor with big bucks shouldn’t be as interested because the potential for big bottom line return is low.
It seems this should be some sort of long tail economics law. Charge zero for your basic service because you can. Make your money on the auxiliary services which leverage the strength of your community.
Kijiji means something like village in Mauri language, I can’t remember. Ebay have a huge european network running of Kijiji sites already, plus they own Gumtree which is big in the UK as well.
Other people in the game elsewhere are olx.com who are big in South America and thru a deal with Friendster will be big in SE Asia soon as well.
CL is a purely US play, but is a really really big site. It may be ugly, but people trust it, and it has a never ending supply of new items, jobs, flats and personal ads that people come to check out. Kijiji has nothing in it yet. Ebay are going to have to populate it from their the ebay.com auction listing at first – maybe the Buy Now at XX$ can be legitimately posted to on Kijiji?
I think CL isn’t immune from competition, but also I think the margins are small in this industry with CL giving a lot away for free. Ebay are gunning to put CL out of business. Very aggressive, and who wants to be known as the people who put Craig out of business???
#s 7 and 32 – eBay and Kijiji/Craigslist are complementary, not always competitive.
Use free classifieds when you are confident in setting price, when price is too low to worry about an auction, or when the stuff’s heavy enough that you just want immediate local pickup. Also when you don’t care about the identity of a buyer/seller.
Use auctions when you don’t know value, or when price is high enough so that minor % increases will easily cover auction costs. Also, eBay escrow services and user ratings help protect higher-value transactions.
Agreed with the comments about Kijiji being an awful name. Brings to mind the old saw, “I know how to spell ‘banana’ – I just don’t know when to stop.”
I hope that Kijiji can figure out how to keep the trolls out. Geesh, have you ever looked at the jobs forum on CL? It’s an absolute mess.
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve career management ::
…being a Craigslist user for years, I have seen this site evolve and believe that its branded template featuring minimalist useability will live on long after the BIGS spin off their own versions. After all, how can you compete with free?
What needs, or will happen, is for this space to evolve as new technologies
are developed. This opens up a variety of opportunitues that allow users
to interface with technology and eachother in new, excitiing and constructive ways…one site that does this is http://www.iPoste.org out of Sausalito, Ca; it hasn’t caught on just yet but I get what they are doing.
If or when, user created video catches on it could take some of this space to the next level.
good article
thx for this stuff and
goodluck for you
I once heard someone say that Kijiji is Swahili for “get a new branding consultant.”
Here’s another craigslist clone I stumbled across recently, it looks identical to Kijiji.
http://www.olx.com/
What’s the point of releasing a site that is the same as something that’s been done already? You might as well get into the business of churning out fake Chanel bags.
@21 Mike – I totally I agree. Craig is an arse. But despite his name in the brand, people love craigslist, and rightly so. It’s more than a site, it’s a movement and way of life. The foundations of craigslist stand on rock-solid ground.
@Duncan – The craigslist interface is not “ugly” it’s minimalist. It has its own beauty.
Great article
http://www.snslamps.com
Knowing the classified industry pretty good I can tell that Kijiji won’t even tickle the 800 Pound Craigslist Gorilla. Despite Craigslist, there is Oodle and others.
Kijiiji could not even take over Europe, despite pushing the product to all Ebay customers,buying out a bunch of very large competitors and going in underdeveloped markets.
The name sucks, the UI sucks, the community sucks.
It’s the worst developed product I’ve seen for a while. Unless they change, nothing will happen.
CL is great. But CL doesn’t do non-English.
CL doesn’t do Web 2.0 / Identity / Social Networking / Semantic Web. They are hostile to people scraping/indexing the site. They aren’t free/open like Wikipedia is.
EBay has all those auctions. It has a lot of eyeballs.
Linked In is probably better for job postings now.
There are much better free dating sites out there. e. Plenty Of Fish
Community features like Missed Connections, the forums (eg. RoFo), and Best of CL set the site apart. But only a small percentage of people know or care about those things.
What ebay cannot change the mindshare of the vast community of CL users, short and simple with a clone site. If Google expands on “Google Base”, makes it simple to post ads from your gmail account and does some other neat things, then I would be worried for CL
Yeah, the name sounds very kiddie and elementary.
Well, ebay makes a nice profit, but I think the company’s not without some obstacles, now and ahead. Otherwise, I’m not sure we would see all these initiatives coming out, and more importantly, that they don’t do well. I have read eBay stores hasn’t done well at all for the company, that their effort to build out the fashion/style aspect hasn’t done that well for the company, etc. I recently heard something about their getting into utility computing. Do I think this will crush them? No. Do I think a company of its size and its investors would worry about this? Sure, maybe.
Their stock seems to do alright and they’ve got something like 43 billion market cap (?). You need at least 1 billion to be acknowledged by shows like bloomberg, CNBC, etc. so obviously, they’re still a player.
I just don’t think they’re building out beyond their initial trick (auction) very well and they should be, considering.
Oh, and I think the name is kind of dumb too. Too hard to remember, too hard to spell.
Ebay Vision – Consolidation and control of global classifieds marketplace
The business model and strategy is ON TRACK.
Check 1)Plant – Acquired Kijiji and 25% of Craig’s. Ebay will acquire 100% Craig’s and merge both at some point
2)Cross Fertilize – ebay assets and build critical mass of users globally
3)Maintain -
4)Harvest – monetize monetize monetize via banner ads, paypal and skype
5)Monitor
———————————————————
control of global classifieds marketplace…he business model and strategy is ON TRACK.
————————————————
They are not ON Track. They are definitely not on target. Just check Alexa numbers for their European sites. There is no growth. Competitors like Oodle, Markt.de, Loquo are all over the place taking away market share.