Feb 16 2008
Ebay’s Local Classifieds Site, Kijiji.com Gaining Momentum, But What A Horrible Name To Brand!
If you haven’t heard, Ebay launched a free classifieds site called Kijiji.com sometime last summer. The site has started to gain momentum among consumers the past couple of months. Since then, it has grown from 362,000 visitors in July, 2007 to 1.8 million in January, according to comScore.
This is a great indicator for those who doubt that the local market is exploding. This however, is more bad news for traditional media newspapers. The internet continues to change consumer habits and the focus has gone from global to local with the current trend manifesting.
As technology continues to advance, classifieds are evolving from the traditional stale black and white text. Classifieds have become huge revenue earners in the online local market. They will be mandatory for any developed geo domains wanting exponential growth.
Do you have a free classifieds section on your developed geo domain? If not, you are leaving alot of consumer needs on the table. Consumers are addicted to classifieds, they are either looking for great deals, or listing them. The word “free” builds traffic and loyalty, all while bringing in advertising dollars.
Once you build loyalty and traffic, then you can start charging listing fees. I have seen many geo sites that do not offer this and only focus on advertisers. Remember, consumers bring in advertisers, so do not forget about their needs. Your number one priority should be to meet or improve consumer needs before even thinking about improving advertising needs.
On a different note, what was ebay.com thinking when they chose the domain Kijiji.com for their local classfieds. It just goes to show you that big media, even though they have been online all these years, has lost touch with effective internet branding. Imagine having to pronounce this website to a friend or even spell it. The only reason it has been successful with traffic is because it is linked on every ebay.com internet property. ebay.com is a top 10 company for internet traffic. So many great names to chose from and ebay picks Kijiji.com, go figure!
Looks like they paid some consulting company $xxx,xxx to come up with a “clever” name, Kijiji means “village” in Swahili. The small i and j seem to run together and make it hard to distinguish between the two making it unreadable after the K. You would think that a company thats owns rent.com and shopping.com would just go out and buy classifieds.com, Duh!!!
Lol Dennis, that would be an easy solution. I am sure they wanted a challenge. Sorry to Ebay, but i just dont see how they are better then craigslist, the nitch is filled, and well done too. So Kiwhachmacall will not make it. At least not to what ebay envisioned it.
Steve, Kijiji.com was launched in March 2005 : http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kijiji.com
But I agree on the name, I think it’s difficult to have worse, maybe it was intentional to avoid casting too much shadow on Ebay ?
BTW, love the new logo and banner !
**SMO***
GeoGuy,
Yes it was launched in 2005 internationally. But it was just launched in America in June 2007. Thank you, I am glad you like the logo.