Internet auction giant eBay has quietly entered the American online classifieds market, pitting it against Craigslist – which seems a very odd move, when you consider that eBay owns a 25% stake in Craigslist. It seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face, and perhaps it is. But eBay opened Kijiji with remarkably little fanfare last Friday. It already runs classified sites in a number of countries outside the U.S., and is the market leader in several in Europe and Asia. But Kijiji, which means “village” in Swahili, is its entree into the U.S. market. “We look at it as competition to Craigslist and other platforms. But we think there is room for competition,” noted Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. But there was no explanation of why eBay would essentially want to compete against itself. Craigslist has classifieds internationally, operating out on San Francisco with a very small staff of 24, and is considered to be the leader in online classifieds in the United States and the ninth most popular site in America. Its revenue comes from paid job listings in several cities and from broker apartment ads in New York. The company also runs the non-profit Craigslist Foundation. A spokesman for Craigslist said the company wasn’t worried by the new competition in the classifieds marketplace. EBay plans to buy ads for Kijiji on search engines and also use unpaid search engine listings, but not to drive traffic to Kijiji from its own site.
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