WebProNews

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.