Kijiji Shows Solid Growth

If, outside of this article, you haven’t heard of Kijiji, here’s betting you will. According to new numbers from comScore, eBay’s Craigslist-like property has seen some pretty impressive increases in unique visitor stats.

From a certain perspective, Kijiji’s growth even looks like a sort of rampage. Erick Schonfeld reports, "[T]he U.S. site alone has grown from 362,000 visitors in July, 2007 to 1.8 million in January . . . . . In comparison, Microsoft’s classified site, Windows Live Expo, attracted only 176,000 visitors in January, Yahoo Classifieds attracted 97,000, and neither Google’s classifieds site nor Google Base even registers on comScore."

So there go three huge corporations, and they didn’t even have a chance in the beginning.

Yet no one’s not quite ready to crown Kijiji king of the classifieds sites. Put it on a graph against Craigslist – and pick a comScore, Hitwise, or Compete graph, it doesn’t matter – and Kijiji gets stomped. The line representing Kijiji pretty much disappears into the x-axis as Craigslist’s marker climbs upward.

eBay owns 25 percent of Craigslist, so that isn’t all bad from the auction company’s point of view. Still, there’s no reason why eBay wouldn’t want the site it owns in its entirety to do better, so it seems that a clash between Craigslist and Kijiji will eventually occur.

There are 7 Comments. Add Yours.

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Nada
February 19, 2008 at 1:56 am

3/4 of those 1.8 million users no doubt are spammers, marketers with multiple accounts. Find all these kids at forums.digitalpoint.com and other marketing forums. Nothing new. The same goes with Facebook, digg, myspace, etc. Too many useless, duplicate, and dead accounts.

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  Steve O
  February 19, 2008 at 5:25 pm
  
  You got it right. Not only the companies you mentioned are affected by spam but also Craigslist. They all battle this "cancer". I don’t think Kjiji will make it because they are trying to penetrate local markets with national approach. They do not understand the local markets, every state / city is a bid different. The national approach works with eBay but not with local classifieds. In my opinion…
  
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Cosmin Ghiu
February 19, 2008 at 3:16 pm

I recently read a post on this from TechCrunch back in Feb 14th 2008 and was intrigued by Kijiji.

There have been numerous craigslist clones that have tried to duplicate craigslist, but unsuccessfully. The beauty of craigslist in my opinion is the fact that it has its roots and foundation in the ‘community’ at the ‘ground level’ if you will.

Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist started with an email highlighting great events with the San Fransisco area and from there saw a need to a central place to freely announce events and eventually classifieds.

By having a slick corporate produced application like Kijiji it has been interesting to see it take off like this.

Plus the name. blah. I hated it. Now its growing on me, and obviously others.

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Tony
February 24, 2008 at 1:33 pm

I think what most people do not see is that creating Kijiji is only part of a well planned phase out of the low volume sellers on Ebay. Ebay has been catering to the large volume sellers for some time now and they have shown a complete lack of support to the small mom and pop sellers they once needed to grow into what they are now.

By creating Kijiji, they are hoping to loose those unimportant ebay sellers from the ebay site while still trying to keep them as members.

Kijiji is Ebay’s way of saying ‘we don’t want you on ebay any longer’ so go play on Kijiji – its for free.

By the way, am I the only one who received a survey from Kijiji shortly after they started and one of the main question was: would you be posting on our site if you would have to pay a small nominal fee?

So you can see where Kijiji might be going in the future: a new garage-sale place – possibly with fees – for the ‘little guys’ that Ebay no longer wants.

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LMHO
February 24, 2008 at 11:06 pm

eBay can’t even run eBay (not to mention the rest of their blunderous acquisitions. can you say skype? etc)… competition for craigslist? HA! That’ll be the day!

eBay only acquired their 25% on a sheer fluke, from a sell~out former employee that Craig had rewarded with what he thought would be worthless stock… Craig says he has no intention of allowing eBay to gain anymore of his site…

And because GREEDbay is too stupid to admit when they’re beat (their poor stockholders), they came up with their 1000 lb weakling, waste of a site, kijiji.

What a joke!

Thanks for the laugh this evening!

Most sincerely,

Raia

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Andy
February 29, 2008 at 2:12 pm

The only competition CL has in my opinion is backpage.com. They’ve been a solid force and a sleeper success in the industry for about two years now. I use both CL and BP but I don’t even touch Kijiji. The 5 minutes it takes to post an ad on Kijiji is 5 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.

Their page rank looks pretty solid right now, but that’s only because the same behemoth that drives CL is driving them. But once people go the site and realize that it’s desolate, they’ll never come back and that page rank will start to plummet.

On the other side of the coin, though…backpage has been steadily growing and silently climbing up the ladder for years now. No one will ever be able to bring craigslist down, but if anyone was even going to get close, it would be BP.

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filipina woman
May 4, 2008 at 4:39 pm

Duh.. i like craigslist much better than.. kijiji. I cannot even say it right – kijiji..duh!