Reuters reports that it has obviated a copy of a grand jury subpoena as an old civil dispute turns into a criminal investigation. Reuters quotes an eBay spokeswoman as saying in an email, “EBay believes that Craigslist’s allegations against eBay are without merit. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves, and we will aggressively pursue our claims against Craigslist.”

She also said eBay would cooperate in any inquiry related to the dispute. Bloomberg reports:

The Sept. 7 grand jury subpoena of Craigslist seeks information pertaining to “incidents where EBay employees engaged in alleged criminal activities and misconduct focused around the misappropriation of proprietary/confidential information from Craigslist.”

The incidents include a February 2005 request by Pierre Omidyar, EBay’s chairman and founder, for information about Craigslist’s approach to adding new cities and advance notice of plans to launch new cities, according to the subpoena.

eBay’s rival site would be eBayClassifieds.com.

eBay purchased a 28% stake in Craigslist all the way back in 2004.

With the new eBay Selling and classifieds apps users can photograph and list an item in less than a minute.  On April 3, the company will introduce a new version of the eBay app for iPad.

"The eBay Selling app makes it easy for sellers to bring even greater value and selection to eBay and offer more great deals for buyers," said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces.

"Whether selling or shopping, we’ve put the world’s largest online marketplace in the palm of your hand, and we’ve introduced a great new option for consumers who prefer to sell and buy in a trusted, family friendly local classifieds format."

eBay says it is relaunching its Kijiji classifieds site in the U.S. as eBayClassifieds.com with improvements in trust and safety, customer service and user experience.  eBay Classifieds does not accept personals or other adult related content.

More than 8 million people use their iPhone to shop on eBay, the company expects to generate $1.5 billion in merchandise volume via its mobile platform in 2010. In 2009, mobile commerce for eBay reached $600 million.
 

Apparently Craiglist has added 140 new cities, including 87 in the United States, 8 in Canada, and 45 in non-North American countries.

"Among the targeted areas in the United States are dozens of small to midsize cities like Susanville, Calif. (population 18,000), Oneonta, N.Y. (13,000), and the counties of Okaloosa and Walton, Fla. (a combined 229,000.)," says Stone. "If that expansion sounds minor, consider that Craigslist also added new sites for international cities like Lucknow, India (population 2.5 million), Shenzhen, China (14 million), and New Castle, Australia, (280,000)."

Craigslist is expected to update the company’s official fact sheet to list all of the included cities by the end of the month. There is not mention of the news on the company’s official blog.

Most of the new sites are English-language only. According to Craigslist, over 50 million people in the US alone use the site. The company also claims to get over 20 billion page views per month. With an added 25% of global coverage, I would imagine it will get a nice boost in that department.

On any given day, about a tenth of Internet users, (9%) visit online classifieds, up from four percent in 2005.

Pew’s findings are based on an April 2009 telephone survey of 2,253 adults. Pew says the margin of error sits at about plus or minus 2.4 percent.

“In the world of online classified advertising,” writes Pew, “Craigslist is by far the most used website in the United States. In March 2009, classified sites averaged 53.8 million unique visitors, up 7% from February. Craigslist had 42.2 million unique visitors in the month of March.”

That’s continued bad news for traditional newspapers, who made millions upon millions of dollars from classified listings over the decades. Likely all the controversy surrounding the so-called “craigslist killer” and subsequent assaults by state attorneys general has only helped craigslist in terms of brand recognition.
 

A report Hitwise emailed to WebProNews reads, "The market share of U.S. Internet visits increased 90 percent to the Craigslist Cities custom category year-over-year in February 2009, while visits to All Other Classifieds grew 22 percent.  Visits to All Other Classifieds had been declining for most of 2008, with visits starting to increase in January and February."

 

So it seems the recession is more or less rescuing some classifieds sites while acting as a rocket booster for Craigslist.  This meshes well with last week’s info about Craigslist replacing MySpace as the top U.S. search term.

It’ll be interesting to see how classifieds companies respond to all of the attention.  They might put their sites in stasis, afraid to change anything and lose traffic.  Or some may churn out upgrades in the hopes of impressing people and keeping them around after the economy recovers.

Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty seemed to back the idea that we’ll see some long-term effects, stating, "Currently the economy is driving the growth among online classifieds, but satisfied buyers may continue to turn to the Web sites when researching purchases."

The testing begins in San Antonio and Pittsburgh, but will likely become more widespread later. The eBay brand seems a bit tarnished, but that brand name is probably the company’s greatest asset. It has a tremendous amount of familiarity among consumers. Kijiji users in the testing cities got emails over the weekend that went something like this:

Dear Kijiji San Antonio user,

Starting in early March, Kijiji San Antonio is going to be trying out a new name, “eBay Classifieds San Antonio.” 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. Of course, we’re very curious to hear what you think so let us know once you see the change.

Also, please rest assured that nothing will change other than the name and the domain! Everything else stays the same. That means your ad will stay posted on the site, but instead of finding it at Kijiji San Antonio you will now find it at eBay Classifieds San Antonio. And, as always, we will continue to be your FREE local classifieds site!
   
eBayClassifieds

Warm regards,

The Kijiji team

P.S. If you happen to browse to one of our sister sites, you may notice that they’re still called Kijiji. So consider yourself special! We chose only San Antonio and one other city to try out this new name for now.

Clearly eBay is thinking about using that brand leverage to compete with Craiglist. This is even acknowledged in the company blog post used to announce the name change.

Despite the harsh opinions many (ex-)sellers hold about eBay, the move appears to be a smart one. As it stands right now, there is nothing on Kijiji’s homepage to indicate that it has anything to do with eBay. The branding will likely boost the site’s use.

AOL partnered with Oodle, which operates the largest network of classifieds services in the U.S. Users will have access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites.

AOL Classifieds links users directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.

"With the current economic climate, providing consumers with an easy way to buy and sell merchandise and services, or make local connections through classifieds is becoming even more important," said Chris Spanos, General Manager, AOL Local and Specialty Verticals.

AOL Classifieds will be competing with more established services such as Craigslist and eBay’s Kijij.

AOL Classifieds is now part of the AOL Local Network, with a monthly reach of 54 million unique visitors.

AOL also launched a classified site for Canada and has plans to launch one in the UK later this week.

It happens so commonly that Craigslist has been blamed for remaking the newspaper industry, and not always in a positive way. Someone wants something and turns to the online classifieds site to see what others posted in a free listing, with a connection likely turning into a transaction.

Classified Intelligence (CI) said in a recent client advisory the desire of all kinds of classifieds sites to find buyers early likely signals a big shift into behavioral targeting. Such targeting looks at what people do while online.

“Classified sites will become a critical part of the infrastructure that captures and understands consumers

Classifieds site Oodle notched a big win for its services. Their online classifieds snared a big customer – Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace.

Oodle CEO Craig Donato blogged about the change, which opened today to the oodles of visitors to MySpace:

The site is also more social: listings are linked to MySpace profiles – not anonymous IDs, and users can enlist their friends to help them buy or sell through MySpace bulletins and blogs.

We

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/oodle-scores-myspace-classifieds-deal-2008-07/feed 5 http://www.webpronews.com/craigslist-little-ads-81-million-in-revenue-2008-04 http://www.webpronews.com/craigslist-little-ads-81-million-in-revenue-2008-04#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:52:40 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=44839 The website devouring the classified industry could hit $100 million in revenue in 2009 with a couple of minor changes, with the old-line newspaper industry helplessly watching from the sidelines.

]]> The website devouring the classified industry could hit $100 million in revenue in 2009 with a couple of minor changes, with the old-line newspaper industry helplessly watching from the sidelines.

Though the powers that be at Craigslist, founder and customer service rep Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster, aren’t commenting on the story from industry analysts Classified Intelligence (CI), they are pulling in an appreciable amount of money on the famously minimalist site. They could do even better.

CI said in its report on Craigslist that the implementation of its $25 job listing fee in three more locations could boost the company’s revenue into nine-digit territory. Through assessment of Craigslist postings in January and March, CI pegs 2008 revenue for Craigslist at $81 million.

Take the job recruiting fee of $25 Craigslist charges in a handful of major metropolitan areas. Kick it up to $75 across the board (that’s the price in San Francisco), and revenue for 2009 should climb to $150 million for a company based in a Victorian-style house that looks like it saw much better days a half-century ago.

The customer service credo of Craigslist, and its modest appointments both in headquarters and in site design, stand in stark contrast to the glassy offices of the newspapers that bore the brunt of the no frills, no fee approach to classifieds that are a hallmark of the site. Craigslist looks like what it is, a site launched years ago as a personal project that never forgot its users.

Some feel like Craigslist should do more, namely the bombastic VP and general manager of eBay’s classifieds competitor, Kijiji, Jacob Aqraou. He doesn’t care for the dated look of Craigslist, or the English-only listings that have only branched out into other languages in recent months.

As CI noted, the sniping comes across as odd, since eBay happens to own a 25 percent stake in Craigslist. The competition is real, however, with Kijiji, Freecycle, and the Village Voice’s Backpage all trying to present themselves as a better classifieds option.

Although some may dispute Craigslist’s real impact on newspaper classified revenue, one publishing professional cited by CI called Craigslist a catalyst that forced newspapers to reconsider their business models.

There isn’t one cause for newspaper fortunes to be in decline. Craigslist is a popular target, especially since CI said in 2004 that San Francisco newspapers lost as much as $65 million in recruitment ad revenue alone due to the site.

Craigslist simply found a niche where demand existed, and they make as much money as they care to earn. One can imagine how much they would make if they tossed an AdSense ad unit into their templates. But to Newmark and company, such a prospect looks unfathomable.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/craigslist-little-ads-81-million-in-revenue-2008-04/feed 77