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Craigslist to surpass eBay in 2009? Compete and Quantcast seem to think so…

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.

According to Compete, Craigslist has grown 76% in the last year while eBay has declined 11.6%:

If that pace continues – and your high schools stats warned you about the dangers of extrapolating- then Craigslist will pass eBay within the year. Wow! That would be big.

That means Craigslist will not only be the bane of all the old media newspapers, but also a former dotcom darling.

Here's the Quantcast graph for another datapoint:

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Written by Andrew Chen
June 25th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
  • Chris

    eBay owns a classifieds site named Kijiji.com and in the long run it may surpass craigslist.com

    Also, Kijiji is in foreign countries under kijiji.fr, kijiji.de, etc. The sum the Kijiji sites may already be more than craigslist.org.

    So I think eBay will be the bane of craigslist.

  • Aaron Burke

    It’s always fun to read snippets of observations like this – pretty amazing that simple web tools can provide so much insight nowadays. All of that said, I think that the key thing to remember about the comparison between these properties is that one has built a multi-billion dollar enterprise and the other has, well, decided not to exploit monetization and maintain it’s crunchy community roots. I’ll take hard cash over page views any day =).

  • http://garthvh.com Garth

    Ebay does own 25% of craigslist, and alot of those craigslist pageviews are for things like casual encounters and discussion boards.

  • Sebastian

    @Chris
    These kijiji-sites exist, but there’s not much more about them. They aren’t very popular. I’ve never heard anybody saying anything about kijiji in Europe.
    Also, kijiji needs to be more successful to become profitable – they have more employees, but can’t become more expensive (Craigslist is free, after all, for most stuff).

    The likelyhood of Kijiij being “the bane of craigslist” is pretty unlikely.
    And: If all kijiji-properties combined were bigger than Craigslist, you could be sure that eBay would have talked about that in public already.

  • http://www.twitter.com/nickleung Nick Leung

    Ebay is becoming saturated with mega-sellers, which precludes little guys like me to see an item at a good price. I would have better return if I sell on Craigslist. Moreover, the buyers and sellers are local. =)

  • Chris

    @Sebastian

    I retract my earlier thought about “eBay being the bane of craigslist”. craigslist won’t die. But certainly eBay will be a thorn in their side.

    The old article below mentions some visitor stats for Kijiji and Craigslist (“… Kijiji had 21.6 million visitors in January, compared to Craigslist’s 27.8 million”)

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/27/kijiji-talks-smack-about-craigslist-we-will-be-no-1-in-the-us/

  • Monk

    major difference: ebay exists internationally, but craigslist is really internal US thingy. I don’t see how it can surpass ebay globally without breaking this self-built cage.

    btw, your numbers are us-only as well, seemingly.

  • Steven Rossi

    There is also http://www.buyersboard.com. This site is combining features of Craigslist and Ebay (open bidding) action

  • http://craigslistexploited.com/ Craigslist

    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

  • http://craigslistproxy.tumblr.com/ Craigslist Proxy

    Very interesting. Never ceases to amaze me what you find online or happening on the net these days.

  • http://phone-verified-craigslist-accounts.blogspot.com/ Phone Verified Accounts

    Craigslist is a huge site and always something new happening.

  • http://www.craigslistproxy.net Craigslist Proxy

    Does look to be something that happens on Craigslist a lot.

  • http://sites.google.com/site/craigslistproxies/ Craigslist Proxy

    I think you can find some great stuff almost every week about Craigslist online.

  • http://www.nortad.com/ Toronto Free Ads Posting

    There is definitely something attractive in craiglist'said unattractive site design

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