We wrote about Kijiji (an eBay company) a year ago, a few months after they had made their first push into the US classified ads market. We quickly added an option to RealBird to make it a very easy, copy and paste operation to manually post your RealBird property advertisement to Kijiji. A few days ago I wrote about the main referral sources to the RealBird single property websites and I thought while I am at it, I follow up by revisiting Kijiji, Oodle and Backpage to see how they compare today, in terms of traffic and demographics. I selected these three classified ads portals, because they support similar verticals (not just real estate, like Trulia and Zillow) and because they are comparable in terms of overall traffic. I left out Craigslist from the comparison because it is still a magnitude larger in terms of traffic compared to these other important destination sites.
Update: Based on the reminder by Craig (see comments), it is important to note, that Oodle provides an API for 3rd party implementations and due to their partnerships with large online outlets like MySpace, listings syndicated to Oodle may reach way more actual people, than the Compete.com chart above would suggest. The point of this post is to show the growth of Kijiji over the last year and the importance of marketing real estate listings there as well.
Kijiji’s own site claims 5 million uniques (vs the 2.5M+ reported by Compete), which is quite possible as Compete.com shows less unique visitors on RealBird sites than the number reported by our Google Analytics deployment.
Digging deeper into the stats (this time using quantcast.com for sub-domain traffic) one can see which markets (DMAs) are the most popular on these sites.
Kijiji.com
Backpage.com
Oodle.com
These charts are quite easy to read and the value of posting your RealBird listings to these classifieds sites is quite obvious, especially if your listing is in one of the top markets. (E.g. Washington, DC metropolitan area on Kijiji with over half a million people visiting a month or New York on Backpage)
Click the images above to dig deeper into the stats and see the monthly uniques in your DMA (Demographics Market Area) Also note that the demographics of these general purpose classified-ads site is different than Zillow’s or Trulia’s (focused on real estate only)
This post might be also a good reminder for all of our current RealBird members to take the time to manually post to Craigslist, Kijiji and Backpage (Oodle is an automatic syndication option). It takes only a few extra minutes per listing and you can potentially expose your property ads to hundreds of thousands of new prospects, out of which it only takes one actual buyer to sell the property 🙂 Instructions and copy&paste code is provided in the RealBird member area.
— Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com
for what it’s worth, a big chunk of traffic for oodle isn’t driven through the oodle.com domain. in addition to operating oodle.com, oodle als0 operates classifieds sites for myspace, lycos, walmart, and hundreds of other sites many of which aren’t counted.
Thanks Craig for the correction. It’s true that Oodle provides an API which enables 3rd party implementations which are not tracked on the same domain name. We saw referral traffic coming from local newspapers’ online classified sites and many of those are powered by Oodle’s technology. I will revise the post shortly to make this clear, i.e. the charts in the post track only the main domain name (TLDs and subdomains) of the respective platforms. The post was intended to show the growth of Kijiji over the last year and as is, it may misrepresents the stats. Good point !
Do you by any chance has some ballpark # of the uniques Oodle serves via the distinct 3rd party implementations?
— Zoltan
Craig – I updated the post. Thanks for keeping my facts straight.