eBay is having second thoughts about how easy it will be to spread the Kijiji brand in the U.S. The company is testing out the name “eBay Classifieds” in two cities, San Antonio and Pittsburgh. A letter sent out to Kijiji members states:
We here at Kijiji thought it made a lot of sense to start using the eBay brand name. After all, we are part of the eBay family and we are a classifieds site…so “eBay Classifieds” just seemed like a good idea.
Maybe it also has something to do with the “j”s and “i”s blending together beyond recognition in “Kijiji.” It’s not just the name that needs work. The number of visitors to Kijiji sites worldwide was up only 7 percent in January to 23.2 million, while Craigslist grew six times faster and widened the gap. It ended January with 41.4 million unique visitors (see comScore chart below).
In the U.S., Kijiji is experiencing much stronger growth, but its 3.7 million unique visitors in January is only a tenth of that of Craigslist (which had 39.4 million U.S. unique visitors, see second chart below). A year ago, Kijiji vowed to become No. 1 in the U.S. It is still far from that goal. And Oodle, which just signed a deal to power Facebook’s classifieds (in addition to MySpace’s and AOL’s), is catching up from below.
Kijiji is going to need more than a name change to challenge Craigslist.
Above is the global chart, below is the U.S. chart.
It seems like a really easy decision. “Kijiji” doesn’t have the same brand recognition, difficult to spell and not suggestive of the service provided (sounds like a board game). “eBay Classifieds” appears much stronger on all fronts. Whether enough to challenge Craigslist, I’d bet the name change helps.
Jumanji
morning gents. cl’’s design reminds me of a classifieds site for geriatrics. cl has so much room for growth and its not being harnessed. kigeegee is a no brainer failure. i predict o0odle will fail and will never not be accepted mainstream.
imagine if they owned handmade.com
honorable “worst domains” mentions:
Ning ….everytime i say it to my partner he tells me to stop saying it. i feel his pain.
Etsy…. now theres a good one.
Mahaaalow is also a honorable mention, sounds like an empty coconut?
BuyLocator.com – get it, got it, good.
As Craig Kilborn says – Jumanji
lol irrevalent?
freefreebiefinder.com/
They should just buy more of Craigslist. Kijiji is dumb.
Until they get the really funny classifieds posts about waking up in the morning surprised to 3some orgies after a hard night of partying, they are nothing.
They just just get Craig Newmark even drunker this time and tell him that eBay owning all of Craiglist will assure his future forever.
Offer to make Craig CTO of eBay or something, there you go.
This whole investing in your competitor thing is retarded. That’s what Microsoft would do.
They need to buy Craigslist. It’s their only option if they want to stay relevant in the classifieds business.
They should all look out for americanlisted.com. Great name, great uniqe service and free of charge!
I need to say that you’re right! I’ve just checked americanlisted.com and they know what they are doing! They are listning all cities in the US, and placing an ad it’s free of charge! Awsome! Cool and easy to use as well. I’ll use their service for sure.
Serves them right for picking such a terrible name.
Even following the lame ER-e trend that flickr started would have been better, maybe they should register a name with “twit” in it for the re-branding, seems to be all the rage these days.
I’m surprised it took this long for eBay to consider changing the name. The Kijiji brand name would never have passed the Peter Lynch school of thought. Perhaps eBay should take a hard look at Oodle.
Let’s hope Oodle goes South to Latin America. Latin America is still pretty much up for grabs. Over 600 Million people. Craigslist has not gained much traction in that market.
Not only is it a bad 2.0 name, but the user experience is pretty crappy to. It’s hard to compete with the lean mean bannerless htm that craigslist offers. It’s fast, simple and works.
The name is just terrible for a site. Makes you not want to visit.
Kijiji = Swahili word for village
Canada = indian word for village
Brands only the French could love. Anything that sounds like rabble or babbling is good with them.
Rejected by Americans
Mahalo = Hawaiian word for thanks
not very catchy
Google, the misspelling of a mathematical exponential unit. This was a good idea. Anything science or math related is almost sure to be a success in America as long as the product is good.
I should be a consultant, oh wait….
try registering honopu.com then finding it is defined in hawaiian as: an angry mob.
Would make for heck of a name for a consumerist type site for hawaii residents that are getting screwed on e-commerce shipping/performance from the mainland
Does Kijiji mean goodbye or aloha?
Good feedback on Kijiji , but I surely believe that the posting here on techcrunch is good enough for people to remember the name now. At least for the tech community for sure.
I prefer the ebay classifieds name.
The name sounds silly, but if you are typing quickly, the I-J-I-J-I comes out very easily and quickly. That alone was a clever idea.
That was a stupid idea. Probably the biggest one as to why they are losing. It was obvious to me when they were in the euro market that it was a liability. They only succeeded there by buying up the competition. Loquo, et, al. They can’t do that here. They already lost, they just don’t know it yet.
The domain name is hard to spell specially to those newbie and don’t even know it part of ebay.com family.
Nat
I hard to remember name specially to those newbie, maybe they don’t even know it’s part of ebay.com family.
Nat
I THINK SO !
They could rename it n00b ads
Compete.com only shows about 2.6 million visitors for Kijiji and around 46 million for Criagslist?
Either ComScore is way off or Compete is.
Comscore is way off on everything.
Full of scammers anyway.
Only use craigslist SO far .I never try to use other directory for commerce purpose because the use of craigslist already attract me not to try other stuff.about name ,well just count the words,only craigslist does has two syllable.sort and easy to remember ,this is I think why he won the traffic
http://www.clasilistados.es
How can a company of eBay’s size be limited to a valueless (in the US) domain like kijiji?
Why does eBay even care about the classified market? By public company standards, there’s not a hell of a lot of money still on the table.
Why don’t they focus on their core brands eBay Auctions, Skype & PayPal are still potential goldmines. Skype still hasn’t gone mainstream and PayPal is primarily limited to online sales. I should be able to use my PayPal account to buy groceries and go to the movies.
We’ve been looking for a home to rent for over a month now… craigslist nothing…. maybe 1 or 2 posts now and then. Kijiji usually has 4 or 5 new postings everyday in our area.
Around here it looks like craigslist has some catching up to do.
they don’t even know it’s part of ebay.com family.
See my comment from last year. I have no problem telling those fools I told you so. Take note of the corporate dildo who was sooo wrong and still doesn’t understand the business he’s in.
http://www.tech...comment-2009308
Nobody even knows about the site, there is no buzz surrounding it like craigslist. We tried to partner with them to give them fresh job content but they don’t support mass job uploads. It’s a catch 22 in the job classified game no jobs no people, no people no jobs.
The name is terrible – you cant spell it and its hard to process when you see it in writing. Its about time kijiji started to leverage the ebay brand (its one of their strengths) – although if successful it starts to take away from eBay and their ability to continue to charge listings fees.
In addition kijiji is just a copy of CL – no real enhancements that make it worthwhile, no innovation – in order for them to have a chance they need to identify CL’s weakness (which it has plenty) and exploit them for their advantage.
Take a look at ilist.com – they have integrated identity (from your social network, FB, twitter, etc.) and give users the ability to promote and spread their listings to their friends and family and offer a significantly cleaner experience for listing and browsing – these are the type of innovations plus many more that anyone competing with CL needs to embrace to have any chance to succeed since CL has critical mass.
Name should have never made it through the eBay bureaucracy.
I agree that Craigslist could be evolved and the UI updated, but it’s all about traffic.
eBay’s not failing, but they’re not thriving either. From the looks of the site, they need to socialize it a bit. It doesn’t have a community feel to me.
Integrate technology that will make trading, selling and connecting easier and they could have a chance.
Time will tell, but eBay should concentrate on their core business at this point. They might also integrate some listings into eBay or vice versa. Maybe that would spur people. Leverage the traffic they already have…that might help…
I agree with John they don’t have a social community.The question is can there existing users except that kind of a change?
Could it be that maybe the auction culture and classifieds need to merge?
Classifieds carry a lot of scams, maybe we need to add some life to those listings or some credibility.
SJ
YouAuction.com
You should have seen the names they rejected before the settled on “Kijiji “:
-Hquernnnnoorgansteeeeniqiqir.
-Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzqqqrrr
-lllll1111lllll1111lllllououououou-wheeeee!
-Yicketydee-yackety-doo-ooomba-poooqa-doo
-Znerqznerqukukukukooo
Sally: Exactly. Silly, hard to spell and doesn’t make you think of EBay. Good decision.
whoever came up with that name should be fired if they havent already?
Attention eBay:
I own orlist.com (.net & .org)
If you’re interested…;)
It’s hard to build a better Craigslist and be everything to everyone.
Ebay should investigate other, better brands and focus on niche markets.
A network of superior sites/services with great, memorable brand names **might** be able to challenge Craigslist.
“Kijiji” is swahili for “small village/town” I’m from kenya so I have no problem spelling it and pronouncing it, I also get it once I go to the site. May be they should have called it “Keejeejee”
I think eBay’s days are over. The only thing they can do know is make more bad aquisitions. Though CL would be a good one.
There is so much room to better the way people are buying and selling online. There needs to be more of a social aspect to these sites.
CL doesn’t want to change. They should, but they are doing great as it is so why? I’ve seen a lot of designers better the way the site looks and user experience but they just don’t care.
Can you believe that the former eBay CEO is going to run for California gov! Then California will be prone to scammers, probably make weird aquisitions like buying islands millions of miles away to be apart of CA. She will even raise fees for us Californians. Probably take away citizens feedback.
Jacob Agraou (head of kijiji US) is a out of touch management consultant masquerading as an Internet executive. He killed all eBay.com related local initiatives through underhanded politics so he can push his Kijiji expansion pet project. Now that its proven a major failure he is trying to take credit for other people’s work on ebay classified/local.
Kijiji’s arguably not a great name, but going with eBay Classifieds seems like a dilution of the main brand. EBay = online auctions, not classifieds.
I’ve used them all but this is the first I’ve heard of Kijiji, it isn’t well known in the states or most of Asia; must be a Euro thing. These sorts of services still make me weary of security issues, how long has it taken for paypal to get where it is today? I use this digital security site for learning about payment systems, etc.
Jose Mallabo from eBay Classifieds Group and eBay Inc. corporate communications here.
The tests in the U.S. will be interesting and fall in line with our ongoing effort to compete in the U.S. market. (More at http://www.ebayinkblog.com)
Panning out though to the global discussion that a lot of folks have brought up…our classifieds business unit is comprised of 7 strong local brands that are often not just the leading classifieds name in the country, but often one of leading web sites overall in that country.
This includes Gumtree, Marktplaats, Mobile.de, LoQUo, Den Bla Avis and Bilbasen. So the ComScore graph comparing Kijiji over CL above is a bit off in terms of a global discussion on traffic because Kijiji is not the only brand we run. (The Kijiji numbers from ComScore include LoQuo figures but nothing else.)
In total, eBay Classifieds Group is the global leader in online classifieds with more than 80 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. If you charted that on top of the above graph, the line would bisect the last full paragraph of the story. And in terms of and close to 19 million live ads at any given time.
That said, each of these businesses is operated locally (in local language, with local management, driving category listings based on local needs and culture) which is why these U.S. tests will not impact any other part of Kijiji at this point.
Cheers,
Jose
Thanks for clarifying that the group is made up of more brands than just Kijiji..
Hi Jose,
the Kijiji brand is terrible, the business didn’t growth very well with this name. Here in Italy I saw some offline campaigns on paper, but I don’t understand how to catch people from paper to online with this domain. I know that Kijiji italy invests about 200K Euros/month in Adsense to feed the site, why not a simple name? I think that the next strategy of Ebay will be a purchase of minor classifieds sites in every country, an international rebranding. In this way Ebay will build an international network of classifieds sites under the proprerty of Ebay Classifieds. The Kijiji brand is a total failure, even in Europe.
Wario
Kijii? Common, Klassifiedz.com or Johnslist.com would have been a better choice..
Sorry kijiji team, usa no win told you last year {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/afQxHtrobb_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Sorry kijiji team, usa no win told you last year ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/Wy37k1GqK4″}}}
I’ve never understood why eBay gave it a try. The online classifieds on eBay have never taken off. What were they thinking?
You may have missed a Twitter msg I sent you, so reposting here…
Kijiji in India has been re-christened as ‘Quikr.com’ from kijiji.in – perhaps an experimental name change?
That is a permanent change.
Jose
Wow, what a dreadful name.
The online classified space is a big market…..I wouldn’t rule out ebay just yet.
It is a huge market that is quickly moving online. We capture about 82 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. That translates into nearly a quarter of a Billion in annual revenue — 3 to 4 times the #2 global player. I like our chances. We’re pretty good at monetization.
kijiji is unlikely to take away any significant market share from craigslist within the US -unless of course law enforcement shuts them down, however, craigslist is also unlikely to take much away from kijiji internationally. Both work well within their confined space.
I say check out iList, it’s a new classifieds site that allows you to link your social networks along with your craigslist account and advertise all over. Plus if you have a iList account you can export your ads to craigslist.
iList is pretty much the new “home base” for online classifieds.
Living Chinese users to recommend that can be used mobile phone to visit the website http://www.tp230.cn
上海骏赛包装机械有限公司 http://www.shjunsai.cn
Craigslist is in hot waters over recent porn charges, but come on…who does not use craigslist. People use it for buying selling used cars, finding nanny for their kids, even finding jobs in the neighborhood. Craigslist should still make sure that it adds more features for its users without loosing its flexibility.
Advise for eBay, buy olx.com, backpage.com, kaango.com, locanto.com, etc. The only way ebay can beat or control craigslist by spreading faster internationally (the way they built kijiji by buying sites like gumtree and quikr)
I’ve been following Kijiji since it’s conception and have to admit — it’s quite confusing. I keep falling back on Craigslist. Good ole’ tried and true Craigslist.
fore HI~please Click it，you will find something interesting~
http://www.hanchi.com.cn
I would never trust the as%#holes at ebey after our experience with ebey.
Ebey started as a free service and slowly ratcheted up its pricing power squeezing the blood out of its customers. I dont trust these blood suckers on a classified site.. dont use Kifuknji or whatever the heck they call it, it is the first step toward motezing (aka charging you for classifieds more than you can afford to pay) it. I would rather pay Craig some money than let the leech ebey squeeze money out of me anymore than it can
maybe ebay will find another swahili word for “we lost”
the only chance ebay has is to buy craigslist 100%
craigslist is a turd of a site as far as function and design, but he has the users
“Kijiji” is hard to read and remember.
what a dreadful name.
The online classified space is a big market
kijiji it is clon of ebay ?
Here http://www.queay.com
Why don’t they focus on their core brands eBay Auctions, Skype & PayPal are still potential goldmines. Skype still hasn’t gone mainstream and PayPal is primarily limited to online sales. I should be able to use my PayPal account to buy groceries and go to the movies.