Adevinta wins auction to buy eBay's classified ads unit for nearly $9B: source | Hacker News Reader

Adevinta wins auction to buy eBay's classified ads unit for nearly $9B: source

reuters.com

60 pointspseudolus41 comments

I've had the same eBay account since 2001 and used it countless times over the years, and yet today I learned not only do they have a classified ads division, but also that it's so prominent that it sold for $9b. Interesting.

It’s very région specific in terms of it being popular. Fairly popular in Canada.

Germany, too - Craigslist never caught on quite as well as eBay Kleinanzeigen (German word for “classified ad”)

Kijiji is the go-to site for classifieds in Canada. Craigslist exists, but it's nowhere near as popular.

Letgo and FB Marketplace are gaining momentum imo. Probably still depends a lot on region and product.

What are the property names? I recall "Kijiji" perhaps in Canada. Are there others?

Kikiji is so inferior to Craigslist... never understood kijiji managed to be THE classifieds in Canada. I guess lots of marketing in the beginning to bootstrap a network effect.

It depends on the market. Here in Vancouver Kijiji is a distant second to Craigslist in terms of volume of listings / activity.

Kijiji covers the entire country including rural areas. Craigslist only covers large cities. Craigslist is useless to anyone who doesn't live near a large city. Also, in my opinion, Kijiji has a better UI and search capabilities.

Gumtree is massive in the UK. They've made some nice money since they bought it.

Dang, Kijiji is actually really solid in Canada. For me, it was like Craigslist except with some pretty good UI/features.

Indeed, I didn't think this was a good move until I found that eBay owns Kijiji. I'm also Canadian and I'm pretty sure Kijiji is way more popular for private buy/sell than Craigslist - at least anecdotally from the people I know.

Most of the things I own come from Kijiji, from my phone, bike, furnitures....

We do love Kijiji up here, don't we? I have no clue why it's so popular and isn't really a thing anywhere else in the world.

Network effect, it is fast and the UX is great.

What's wrong with Adevinta? I haven't really use any of their services. But I just went on shpock or what not and it seems fine?

Kijiji might be popular "in canada" but in vancouver CL is dominant.

This article from The NY Times explains why Kijiji took off in Canada faster than its parent eBay. In addition, when Kijiji first started, Craigslist did not have a French version of their site for the Montreal/Quebec market, which Kijiji did.

"A fundamental problem for eBay in Canada, Mr. Shiau said, is that Canadians generally do not like auction-based pricing. On top of that, Ms. Bannister (Head of eBay Canada) found that because Canada’s vast geography and low population density make shipping costs high and delivery times long, buyers of secondhand goods preferred to make deals in person.

To Ms. Bannister, the answer for eBay seemed to be online classified ads. At the head office, however, the idea did not appear to be quite so obvious. At the time, about 10 percent of Canadians used Craigslist, a level many eBay executives thought meant that it was fully entrenched. Nevertheless, they gave Ms. Bannister some classifieds site software being developed for Europe along with a small amount of money to adapt the site and market the result."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/technology/kijiji-a-flop-...

> Activist investors Elliott Management Corp and Starboard Value had been pushing eBay

Well there's your problem.

Problem for who exactly? This isn't a local newspaper being swallowed up and then gutted by some faceless private equity group, which would be detrimental to the public interest. It's a multi-billion dollar business changing hands between two well-heeled megacorps.

Problem for Ebay, which is why they were forced to consider the sale at all. Elliot and Starboard are two of the biggest agitator investors out there, and together they’re formidable. You really don't want them owning a large percentage of your stock unless you want problems.

Another way to look at it is that Elliot & Co have a good track record of raising stock prices, so as a shareholder you actually do want them on board.

Gotta love them short term gains.

What is the long term if not the sum of the short terms?

“Short term bad long term good” is a convenient argument for management in a dispute with shareholders. It allows them to discard the objective measure of their performance in favor of speculation. Ignore the years of stagnant growth and keep paying each of us millions, says management! Our plan is a long-term one, you see.

Short term is greedy optimization. You get stuck in a local minimum, which may - and often is - be a very bad one, compared to other minima you could reach if you had a more long-term approach.

Short term in terms of certain private equity groups getting involved = company gets strip-mined for all its worth and its empty husk is discarded.

Can we step back and agree about our terminology? I'd say that short term is up to a year or so. Most PE plays I've heard about are years-long endeavors.

If this is true, why does the share price go up? Who is buying the stock after the short-term play? Is the market just dumb, and the only people who know the truth are the disgruntled-ex management who complain to the media about short-termism?

My perspective is that activist actions do incur some risk but have positive expected value in the long run. There are horror stories, but overall they create value, which is why people continue to invest in them.

I agree it’s possible to get stuck in local optima, but it’s awfully convenient for many CEOs to be in that situation. I suppose everyone who isn’t already running a trillion dollar company is in a local optima, if you think about it. It’s hard to blame shareholders for getting fed up after enough years of that and saying enough is enough, maybe you aren’t ever going to climb the mountain and should go to that local optima instead.

Wow. This is very surprising for me. I only knew of the ebay-kleinanzeigen.de sites in the German webspace, and those don't seem worth anywhere near that much. Technology and design seem to be out of the 2000s and it should be really easy to replicate.

It's easy to replicate design and technology. It's extremely difficult to achieve such a high equilibrium of sellers & buyers on the platform. These businesses benefit extremely well of network effects, creating high barriers of entry.

IIRC eBay Kleinanzeigen was heavily marketed around 2010. As a consequence it's virtually the only classifieds site in Germany.

I hope this creates some incentive to make the website feel less abandoned. The German version is a huge pain to use, presumably because they wanted to push the main site (pay the commission, get better service).

Nope they have a large product and tech org looking after the German sites. It’s just kinda what happens for some reason. Check out olx or other adevinta destinations. Once you crack the buyer seller side of things life gets really comfortable

I’ve always felt it was a strategic asset for eBay to be the most popular but always marginal classified ad product to keep the eBay cash-cow going.

Only recently did they implement some mild feedback rating system.

Probably a good time to sell for eBay, since a lot of classified ads are moving to FB Marketplace.

wow, considering that ebay's valuation is ~$40, this unit alone is/was one fourth of it

Looks like they're keeping a stake though. We don't know how much of it they actually bought.

Presumably they also kept 900million from the auction fees... Right? ;-)

First time to hear about adevinta. And they can afford 9b, Quiet surprised.

It's 60% owned by Schibsted, one of the largest media conglomerates hailing from the Nordics. They recently spun out their non-Nordic classifieds into a subsidiary and listed it onto the Oslo Stock Exchange.

https://schibsted.com/about/who-we-are/adevinta-a-schibsted-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schibsted

Gives a new meaning to the unbundling of eBay

My first reaction reading this headline: “What could possibly be classified about eBay’s ads business?”

Here is where craigslist would have been sold off if Meg Whitman had been successful.

For all of its independence, I think craigslist missed a huge opportunity to improve fairness and quality in housing across the US.

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