Online Classifieds

At the Structure '08 conference, one of the eBay guys made the comment that scalability was a solved problem for them. A fellow conference goer observed: airplanedan: must be nice to be ebay... James Barrese says they have scaling figured out and never have to worry about it again #structure08. This comment made me curious... Growth obviously makes scalability really hard, and how much is eBay growing anyway?? After pulling up a couple charges, in particular comparing things to Craigslist, you see some interesting results.

On andrewchen.typepad.com

Nimble start-ups like Kijiji and Oodle are challenging Craigslist's long-standing reign as the undisputed leader in web classified ads. If you've never heard of a website called Kijiji, you're not alone. Named for the Swahili word for "village," this new classified service owned by eBay draws just 2.5 million unique visitors in the U.S. each month — less than a tenth of the visitors to Craigslist. Nonetheless, this seemingly inconsequential site with an oddball name is at the heart of a legal scuffle between eBay and Craigslist, in which the companies are suing each other for unfairly undermining their business. A quick glance at the global online listings market reveals why classifieds-king Craigslist is worried. While Kijiji is just a speck in Craigslist's eye in the U.S., worldwide it gets just 26% fewer visitors, according to comScore. In the U.S., Kijiji has become the second most trafficked, general-purpose classified site just one year since it launched.

By ANITA HAMILTON

Classifieds will close on July 31^st. Two years isn't too great a run for a product, especially when the people behind its launch would have liked for the thing to overtake Craigslist.  Still, according to a post on the official site, Windows Live Expo will "discontinue service" in late July. Users have already been barred from creating new accounts, posting new listings, extending listings, and upgrading to premium listings, so Live Expo's remaining days will be a matter of letting the current offerings expire.  This slow death won't exactly be confidence-inspiring.

By Doug Caverly

The site is hosted by Oodle.com, an aggregator of classifieds from over 80,000 websites, including eBay's Kijiji, Craigslist. Oodle also syndicates listings - published by local marketplaces or directly posted by consumers - across the Web. Oodle listings appear on over 200 sites with over 500k new listings a day, according to information on the Oodle website. Visitors to the Walmart.com Classifieds site can post items for sales for free, and have the listings show up throughout the Oodle network.

By Ina Steiner

Mobile Web surfers in the U.S. spend more time on classified-ad site Craigslist than on any other Web site, and they spent nearly twice as much time browsing as their British counterparts in March. Those are among the findings from a study by mobile research company M:Metrics in which client software installed on participants' smartphones gleaned information about user activity. It found U.S. owners of smartphones -- not even counting iPhones or BlackBerry devices -- spent nearly 4 hours, 38 minutes using their browsers in March. U.K. subscribers spent just under 2 hours, 25 minutes, on average. The survey tracked 3,500 users of Symbian, Palm and Microsoft Windows Mobile smartphones in the U.S. and U.K.

By Stephen Lawson

Online classifieds and vertical ads in the United States will make up nearly a quarter of all Internet advertising in four years, predicts the Kelsey Group. The Princeton, NJ-based research company anticipates online classified and vertical advertising, which combined now account for about 18 percent of online ad spend, will reach 24 percent by 2012. Meanwhile, revenues for interactive classifieds and verticals -- called "marketplaces" by Peter Krasilovsky, Kelsey Group's program director of marketplaces, will reach $14.7 billion by 2012, according to the firm.

By Fred Aun

Not everyone is fond of the flaky characters who make or respond to posts on Craigslist, but the company itself has a fairly clean, people-friendly reputation. It's certainly not typically known for going on bullying sprees around the 'Net in an attempt to protect its own trademarks, ala Apple and the use of the word "pod" or, say, logos that also happen to contain representations of apples. But that reputation could be changing, as Craigslist recently issued legal threats against a blogger over trademark infringement. Tim White started the Craigslist Blog (located at craigslistblog.org) in late February of this year.

By Jacqui Cheng

Question: What's the biggest classified ad outfit in the online world? Craigslist? Google? Answer: eBay.

EBay  is sweeping past rivals in offering online classified services to users worldwide, a little-publicized fact about the online auction king."Within six months of entering the market for online classifieds (three years ago), we blew past all of them," said Jacob Aqraou, the general manager of the classifieds unit.Aqraou says eBay began slowly building through acquisitions.Today, classifieds are eBay's fastest-growing business unit. In the fourth quarter, classifieds revenue surged 104% from the year-earlier quarter, the company says.

BY DOUG TSURUOKA

Charging in Just 11 Markets, 25-Person Company Generates Record Revenue, Classified Intelligence Shows

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla.-Craigslist, the free-classifieds Web site that has become a global phenomenon, is expected to generate $81 million in revenue in 2008 and could easily top $100 million with a few simple changes that might improve the service, a new report shows. The report from Classified Intelligence, the leading consultants in the classified advertising field, estimated growth of 47 percent over $55 million in revenue for Craigslist in 2007. The 12-page report, which will be distributed with PowerPoint slides, also covers a number of issues facing Craigslist, such as its “sleaze factor,” and its up-and-coming competitor, corporate cousin Kijiji.com.

SAN MATEO, Calif., March 4 - Oodle (http://www.oodle.com/), a whole new kind of classifieds, and the Golden Gate Better Business Bureau, today announced that they will work together to help consumers buy and sell things more safely through online classifieds. The program includes the launch of a safety guide for consumers and a dynamic web site that chronicles the latest scams and frauds to avoid when using online classifieds.

Denver, Colorado based Superhero.es has built crgslst, a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind." Unfortunately, crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past. This situation brings up a number of questions about intellectual property, RSS and mashups.

by Marshall Kirkpatrick