Kijiji, a Flop in the U.S., Rules Online Classifieds in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Kijiji, a Flop in the U.S., Rules Online Classifieds in Canada

nytimes.com

46 pointscarlchenet26 comments

I love Kijiji. It's extremely popular in Ontario. Everyone I know uses it for buying and selling anything, myself included. It's free, simple to use, and there is a huge amount of traffic on the site so you can sell things quickly. People use to use AutoTrader but no one I know uses it anymore. They seem to have lost their market share to Kijiji long ago.

It was one of the first things I missed when I moved to NYC. Kijiji is so much better than craigslist.

unseraphim: you're hellbanned. And looking at your past posts, it's probably a good thing.

I think classifieds sites tend to have this phenomenon of being localised to regions simply because, by nature, its usefulness derives from finding people and services in your physical area. And much like social networks, the more people use it, the more useful it is.

In Australia, and I think Britain, most people use Gumtree. And in New Zealand they use a similar site called TradeMe

I think this is the strongest factor. Once you have a critical mass locally, it's pretty hard to shift the user base - it would need a compelling reason, and you aren't going to get that from minor differences in UX.

Gumtree is also part of eBay Classifieds Group.

I believe the main reason for Kijijis success in Canada is in its early years Kijiji canada ran massive PPC arbitrage campaigns - buying clicks for pennies from Google and reselling to unsophisticated Canadian media buyers for a significant markup. This enabled Kijiji Canada to continually invest massively into audience acquisition in Canada for many years, and as marketplace value is driven by scale, enabled them to build up the leadership position they have today.

That doesn't square up with the article or anything I've heard about Kijiji's success in Canada. Can you point to anything supporting the assertions?

Mostly conversations with Kijiji Canada employees between 2008-2010. I vaguely remember them mentioning the recruitment of a "super affiliate" from Montreal to manage their PPC program as being a key event in their success in Canada.

> This enabled Kijiji Canada to continually invest massively into audience acquisition

Could you elaborate on how they did this?

can you expand on this? i'm curious how the process worked given that arbitrage usually doesn't work that way.

Kijiji changed its name to "Kleinanzeigen" here in Germany few years ago, but its quite popular compared to craigslist etc.

And rightfully so, "Kijiji" is a terrible name.

To be exact: eBay Kleinanzeigen with the domain kleinanzeigen.ebay.de

Interesting. I live in BC and Kijiji definitely isn't as dominant as Craigslist here. It's common to find jobs, second hand goods, and cars on Craigslist. I haven't heard anyone refer to Kijiji for anything here. Quite different from ON where Kijiji does seem to have the dominance that the article referred to.

Interesting, where in BC? I also live in BC (Okanagan), and _everything_ is Kijiji. I'm not sure I've opened Craigslist in years.

I'm assuming by BC you mean Vancouver? There's a few Canadian cities that Craigslist opened up sections for back when Craigslist was new and getting lots of media coverage, and Craigslist continues to do well there. But kijiji allowed posts from anywhere at the same time as Craigslist was restricted to a few cities, so kijiji dominates almost everywhere.

You're right. I was overly broad with my BC comment. I live in Vancouver.

Victoria, BC is mostly usedvictoria dominated, but a minority use craigslist and it actually seems to have fewer flakes on it. Kijiji is a ghost town here.

In live in Quebec City. I used Kijiji to sell my car a few years ago and it still is the site I use to sell stuff. Reading this article made me go to Craigslist to see if it was any better now. Nope. I needed to click a dozen times to get to the french version for Quebec City. Nobody there. No photos in the lists? Move on.

Before that, I was literally thinking "CraigsList still exists?". I guess so, my Mac autocorrects CraigsList but does not have Kijiji in its dictionary... :)

Vancouver must be one of the exceptions to this. I'm from Winnipeg, which uses only Kijiji, and recently moved to Vancouver. When I was looking for an apartment, I tried Kijiji and didn't find much at all, after talking to some people I know from Vancouver, they told me to try CraigsList and that's where all the posts were. I actually prefer the cleaner interface though, Kijiji is quite cluttered in comparison.

Here in Alberta Kijiji is King. I remember going to the US and telling my boss that we should look for used stuff of Kijiji. All I got was a blank stare.

On a sidenote, Kijiji should make their Android app better.

In Ottawa, kijiji appears to run second to usedottawa.com, but both get good traffic. Craigslist is a ghost town.

I wish craigslist were more popular here (ottawa); I find kijiji's interface to be too noisy and does some crappy things (eg. Middle-clicking opens the ad in both the current tab and a new tab, totally useless). Also, while I understand the need to make a profit off the average user, kijiji seems to be taking the nickle-and-dime route which is annoying and annoying people into paying likely just incentivises them to try elsewhere first (haven't done the research on that but I'm pretty sure it applies to a statistically significant number of people).

Maybe two years ago, but not today. Kijiji has 43,000 listings in the automotive section but usedottawa only has 3,200.

Compare usedottawa's 27,000 ads under "Latest" to Kijiji's 197,000 under "Buy & Sell" (does not include autos).

It's fair to say that Kijiji has won.

Just like here in the UK. Gumtree (also owned by eBay) dominates over Craigslist.

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