One of the more amusing things within the tech industry is the excitement the “fill-in-the-blank-killer”. A new mobile e-mail devices comes as out as “Blackberry-killer”. Or a new MP3 player emerges as a potential “iPod-killer”. Truth be told, none of these are killer at all but merely fodder for news on a slow day.
This clearly explains the excitement about eBay’s Kijiji, a classified-ad service that is apparently the “Craigslist-killer” because it has been expanded to 220 cities. Mind you, it is July 4th so there’s probably not much tech news today so perhaps that’s why Kijiji has captured the spotlight. Please note that Kijiji has been around for two years, and although it attract a lot of traffic, you never hear anyone saying “Hey, I’ve been a Craigslist user for years but I have switched over to Kijiji because it’s so much better”.
There’s nothing wrong with Kijiji or eBay’s efforts to push harder into the online classified market, which is huge albeit somewhat fragmented right now. And you have to give eBay credit for having two horses in the race: Kijiji and its 25% stake in Craigslist, which it picked up a few years ago from an early Craigslist employee.
But let’s be honest here, Kijiji’s not Craigslist, and never will be.
For more, check out Mathew Ingram and Scott Karp, who contends Kijiji’s expansion is yet another blow to newspapers. As well, here’s a video of me interviewing Craiglist CEO Jim Buckmaster at the mesh conference four weeks ago.
Technorati Tags: Craigslist, eBay
I don’t know what it is with Kijiji either, but they’ve got some markets tied up. Craigslist and Kijiji both opened up an Ottawa site around the same time (I think), but Kijiji has a strong lead both in number and quality of ads.
One thing about Craigslist — it’s a pretty weird site the first time you get there, with lots of non-local content in places you’d expect to find local. When Ottawa’s Craigslist was new, instead of being empty it seemed like it was just full of non-local ads. For established Craigslist cities I don’t think Kijiji stands a chance, but as they start to expand into smaller cities (like, say, Ottawa) I think Kijiji’s better separation of cities’ content is a strong selling point for people not accustomed to either service.
It’s easy to assume that Craigslist’s established value/mindshare in big tech cities brings some value to smaller cities with more traditional industries, and I’m not sure that’s the case — Craigslist’s big San Francisco presence doesn’t really help people in Saskatoon, and when both Craigslist and Kijiji open their Saskatoon sites all they’ll be able to do is hope that they reach that critical mass of initial local ads first.
Mark:
You should look into Kijiji in more depth. In addition to the posting above, Kijiji Canada has more traffic than Craigslist (by a factor of 2!). Craigslist, as a pioneer, has significant mind share, especially in the major cities. However, how they (CL) evolve will be influenced in part by how they deal with a competitor like Kijiji…
I’ve already caught multiple instances of Kijiji ad publishers listing the same ad in several cities. I’m not even certain whether that’s a TOS violation but Kijiji ought to put some controls in place as Craigslist has to prevent users from placing multiple ads and using the service to spam.