“Kijiji” Isn’t Kutting It. How about eBay Classifieds?
eBay is having second thoughts about how easy it will be to spread the Kijiji brand in the U.S. The company is testing out the name "eBay Classifieds" in two cities, San Antonio and Pittsburgh. A letter sent out to Kijiji members states:
Maybe it also has something to do with the "j"s and "i"s blending together beyond recognition in "Kijiji." It’s not just the name that needs work. The number of visitors to Kijiji sites worldwide was up only 7 percent in January to 23.2 million, while Craigslist grew six times faster and widened the gap. It ended January with 41.4 million unique visitors (comScore numbers).
In the U.S., Kijiji is experiencing much stronger growth, but its 3.7 million unique visitors in January is only a tenth of that of Craigslist (which had 39.4 million U.S. unique visitors). A year ago, Kijiji vowed to become No. 1 in the U.S. It is still far from that goal. And Oodle, which just signed a deal to power Facebook’s classifieds (in addition to MySpace’s and AOL’s), is catching up from below.
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