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

nytimes.com

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

#21

Post by r0ssar00 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #10

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).

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

#22

Post by alexk7 »

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... :)

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

#23

Post by jagger27 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #10

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

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.

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

#24

Post by Lorenzo45 »

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.

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

#25

Post by jessriedel »

kitcar wrote: post #14

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…

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

Could you elaborate on how they did this?

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

#26

Post by jeremy_wiebe »

notatoad wrote: post #5
jeremy_wiebe wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#27

Post by spada »

kitcar wrote: post #14

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…

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

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

#28

Post by barbs »

nfoz wrote: post #9
cdnsteve wrote: post #6

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.
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