« Previous post
Next post »

March 27, 2008

Craigslist, Coming Soon In A Language Near You

Michael Arrington

38 comments »

The Craigslist phenomenon continues, and it isn’t just in English any more.

The site dominates the U.S. market for classified advertisements, with nearly 27 million unique monthly visitors (Ebay’s Kijiji, by contrast, has just 2.3 million U.S. visitors/month). But the fact that the service was available only in English hurt it internationally, where Kijiji is a close second.

Craigslist is now available in Italian, French, Portuguese and German. “Basque, maybe Klingon” are coming soon. :-)

CrunchBase Information
Craigslist
Kijiji
Information provided by CrunchBase
  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. IndianBytes.com

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:31 am

  2. Wuensch-Media.de

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

  3. Online classifieds: Craigslist expanding in European languages « Europe 2.0

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:18 pm

  4. Technical Help

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

  5. Craiglist se lanza en diferentes idiomas

    April 12th, 2008 at 1:54 am

  6. Resell Rights

    May 23rd, 2008 at 2:17 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Suraj Luke

    March 27th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    This is good news! Now Kijiji has lots of catching up to do…

  2. Steen

    March 27th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    Which markets is CL popular in other than US and Canada?

  3. Andrew

    March 27th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

    This is good and all but why is this such a big thing? They have a total of probably 1000 words to translate.

    Although it’ll be interesting what the rough translation is of casual encounters

  4. MrCashyCash

    March 27th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

    Ruining margins in a country near you.

  5. David

    March 27th, 2008 at 11:11 pm

    In addition to Kijiji, there are other free classified sites around the world with massive traffic that operate multi-country and multi-language sites.
    For example: Adoos, VivaStreet, OLX, etc.

    Most of these other players are really well known in Europe and Latin America

  6. KJ

    March 27th, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    They didn’t do a very thorough translation job. Click on any category and most of the words are still in English. For example:
    http://quebec.fr.craigslist.ca/pet/

    All the help pages linked near the top are still in English too.

  7. CARversation.com

    March 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am

    i thought its only popular in us

  8. skidoo

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:00 am

    this will NEVER work, at least in a country i know : France.

    2 reasons for that :

    1) “Craig” as a firstname really doesn’t sound french and that’s a turn-off, as most french feel they have enough of McDonald’s. Disney and other american brands invading our much richer culture, now using the weak dollar as leverage.

    2) There are plenty of free classifieds already available, the most famous arising from free paper journals offered in subway and bus stations and relying on brand advertisement for their business model. So they’re offering for free a way to place classifieds and benefit from the best of both worlds, web and physical news paper.

  9. Mapro Chang

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:12 am

    yeah, there’re also plenty of such free classfieds already in China. How Craiglist beat them? I think this is one of problem that craiglist team should face.

  10. vicky

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:57 am

    Wondering will it be available in india in hindi.

    admin
    http://freeindiantv4ever.com

  11. Luis Pereira

    March 28th, 2008 at 2:20 am

    CL would be better off catering to non-English speaking people living in the US market, in particular the Hispanic and Asian communities, as opposed to international markets.

  12. big

    March 28th, 2008 at 2:42 am

    interest

  13. iWalk

    March 28th, 2008 at 4:26 am

    great progress:)

  14. Agusti Pons

    March 28th, 2008 at 5:02 am

    A good and free alternative for the job market, http://www.ipsojobs.com multilingual, free and global.

  15. Nicole Simon

    March 28th, 2008 at 5:13 am

    International success does not start with languages but with many many MANY other things.

    Quick look at the German one - no reason to go over to craigslist and leave Kijiji. Way less features, akward translation, just a few cities, no content except english based ones …

    It has it’s relevance in the US, but over here it would take a lot more to succeed. Plus, K. has already taken most spots here for the real local adaption in the search engines and I do not see that change very soon.

    Example for them not getting it? For a start in a local language as German to start of with Zurich (for the ones not know: that is switzerland), and have it spelled the English way is just symptomatic.

  16. Samson

    March 28th, 2008 at 5:13 am

    geez…better late then never.

    Too bad it took them the threat of competition to convince them that servicing to other languages mattered.

  17. I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog

    March 28th, 2008 at 5:42 am

    Ich verlasse mein Haus heute. Bitte kommen Sie und nehmen Sie alles was nicht festgenagelt ist. Meine Möbel, mein Pferd, meine Frau - alles muss weg!

    Das ist keine List. Würde Craigslist Sie lügen?

  18. Rob

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:01 am

    As many have stated Craiglist will be very late in getting into some of the markets and I agree that simply translating category names isn’t enough. ebay through Kijiji, LoQuo, Gumtree, Marktplaats et al have dominance in many of the European markets.

    In the UK Gumtree is number one by some way, Craiglist ranks as the 26th most visited classified site - with traffic of around 86,000 visitors a week - they’ve been around in the market for some time - but simply being there doesn’t guarantee success.

    The local markets are being better served by other classified sites.

  19. John

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:01 am

    Great…now I can browse affiliate link spam in the language of my choice.

  20. Job Board News

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:22 am

    would love to know why spanish wasn’t first. we tried to set up a spanish craiglist at latinolink.com and gave up, thank goodness, lol.

  21. micfo.com

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:31 am

    Not sure it available in Spanish language, it is widely spoken language as per wikipedia 322 and 400 million people natively speak Spanish.

  22. John

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:26 am

    the real winner is e-bay who owns both kijiji and 25% of craigslist

  23. Daniel Serra

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:54 am

    Another one in spanish for latin america, small today but with high potential, is Nexo Local.

    http://www.nexolocal.com/

  24. Raja

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:06 am

    @ 10 / vicky

    Have you tried Vivastreet India? Do you think Vivastreet India would benefit from having the entire website translated to Hindi?

    http://www.vivastreet.co.in

    Disclaimer: I work for Vivastreet

  25. Baller

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:14 am

    craigslist is so profitable it’s scary. from what i’ve read they have more than a million dollars of revenue per employee. this sounds like more cash for them. craig and jim are RICH, the funniest part is how they “try” to de-emphasize how much cash we all know they rake in.

  26. Make Money Online .Pro

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:43 am

    I hate that list, its so non-navigational but yet has sooooooo much info .

  27. Aaron Brazell

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:49 am

    In the immortal words of Sara Lacy, “Yay Spain!” :)

  28. Search Engine Optimization Journal

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am

    Congrats to Craigslist… crazy how the most simple concept for a website has gone so far.

  29. Sports Lessons

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am

    It’s refreshing to see a company do so much with so little personnel. They are my hero.

  30. Roald Cyberath

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    @Suraj Luke : it’s the other way around : internationally, Craigslist has a lot of catching up to do compared to Kajiji or other players.

    @John : true : eBay wins on both fronts.

    I would also agree with Rob and skidoo : it’s a tough market, when there are well-established local players, often paper classifieds that offer online ads for free as well.

    Here’s my further analysis on this.

  31. Delia

    March 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am

    Michael,

    As far as I can tell you are not a dummy, so why take such a superficial look at the issue? (I’m assuming you are not withholding from your readers things you are aware of).

    Delia

  32. Zoltan

    April 7th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    It is a progress. It is hard to compete with the big and old sites but I believe there is still room for more players in the market, even if you have to compete with players like eBay or the big national newspapers. We are building our own free classified network, will be ready soon. http://www.kugli.com

« Previous post
Next post »