

Kijiji, a Flop in the U.S., Rules Online Classifieds in Canada - carlchenet
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/technology/kijiji-a-flop-in-the-us-rules-online-classifieds-in-canada.html

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cdnsteve
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.

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

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

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barbs
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

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ska
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.

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kitcar
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.

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pbreit
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?

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kitcar
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.

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

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

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jeremy_wiebe
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.

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notatoad
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.

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

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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...
:)

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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.

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osipovas
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.

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

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r0ssar00
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).

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

