EBay has released it's free classified site for the US market. It is a direct competition to Craigslist. Pretty much the same coverage of categories. I searched for real estate ( Housing >> Homes for sale) in the SF Bay Area and New York and not much came up. Few listings only, but this is a brand new site and being backed by EBay, with all their marketing resources, I suspect it will grow very fast. Having that said, it will be interesting to see how much it can challenge Craigslist's dominance on the US classified market.
Up till now, Kijiji focused on Canada, Europe and some part of Asia. Now it is available in 220 cities in 50 US states.
Compete.com shows no significant traffic compared to Craigslist yet, but Kijiji growth faster at this point. Click the graph to see the detail stats:
On the other hand, Kijiji is already comparable in terms of traffic to Vast.com and Edgeio.com
I will check back within a month or so to see how the traffic and post count increased, now that this is available in the US. I think one can get some marketing edge at this early stage by posting homes for sale on Kijiji, due to the fact that the current inventory is so low. I bet EBay will start heavily marketing this new site.
I am looking forward to hearing your take on this new service.
If you decide to post on Kijiji.com, please leave the link of your Kijiji ad as comment below; for the rest of us to see.
UPDATED:
BusinessWeek had an article about Kijiji: "eBay Takes on Craigslist" - go check out their take on this at
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2007/tc2007075_395980.htm
-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com
Online listing marketing and map-based IDX search
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