There has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the redacted complaint made public by eBay regarding its lawsuit with Craigslist and, more recently, with Craigslist’s lawsuit with eBay filed last week. I have been approached by a number of Ink readers and employees at eBay asking me why I have chosen NOT to address it here (after all, if Craigslist addresses on its own blog here, and here why not eBay?). I had chosen not to for two reasons:
1) I think the blogosphere is doing a pretty good job addressing the details on its own without me jumping in repeating what is already being said.
2) It’s not like I can provide facts beyond what has already been made public. Unfortunately, any questions asked here on Ink, regarding the lawsuit(s) specifically, will go unanswered until a time when further details can be given.
However, with all the lawsuit hubbub surrrounding Craigslist and eBay , it would be easy to miss a little story that ran in Reuters recently regarding the overall rise of web classifieds.
The article references motorcyle and bicycle listings on Kijiji growing nearly 300% since January, and similar spikes have been noticed in ads for cameras, phone and computers over the 80% overall growth of general “For Sale” items.
“We’ve been growing quickly as a site, but 300 percent really pops out,” said Martin Herbst, general manager of Kijiji.com, adding that consumers may be selling higher-value goods first as they try to clear out what they don’t need.
The full article can be found here.
For further reading, IBD put the whole online classifieds business in perspective back in April – showing that ComScore lists Kijiji as 6th overall in the US for online classifieds and growing steadily. No awards for those correctly guessing number 1.
Cheers,
RBH
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