• TechCrunch , Friday, February 15, 2008 12:15 PM

EBay owns a 25% stake in local classifieds leader Craigslist, but still decided to launch competitor Kijiji to capitalize on the huge hyper-local search market. Kijiji went live overseas first and then came to the U.S. last summer. Since then, traffic to the U.S. version of the site has grown dramatically, from 362,000 visitors in July 2007 to 1.8 million in January 2008, according to comScore.

This places Kijiji ahead of Microsoft's Windows Live Expo with just 176,000 visitors, Yahoo Classifieds with 97,000 and Google's classified service and Google Base--whose traffic didn't even register as blips on comScore's radar. Kijiji also ranked ahead of smaller competitors like Oodle and Vast.

While Kijiji's traffic represents less than 10% of the 26.7 million U.S. visitors Craigslist had in January, Erick Schonfeld says that it begs an inevitable question. "EBay is obviously doing something right with Kijiji. But can it ever catch up to Craigslist?"

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