I love Kijiji. It's extremely popular in Ontario. Everyone I know uses it for buying and selling anything, myself included. It's free, simple to use, and there is a huge amount of traffic on the site so you can sell things quickly.
People use to use AutoTrader but no one I know uses it anymore. They seem to have lost their market share to Kijiji long ago.
I think classifieds sites tend to have this phenomenon of being localised to regions simply because, by nature, its usefulness derives from finding people and services in your physical area. And much like social networks, the more people use it, the more useful it is.<p>In Australia, and I think Britain, most people use Gumtree. And in New Zealand they use a similar site called TradeMe
I believe the main reason for Kijijis success in Canada is in its early years Kijiji canada ran massive PPC arbitrage campaigns - buying clicks for pennies from Google and reselling to unsophisticated Canadian media buyers for a significant markup. This enabled Kijiji Canada to continually invest massively into audience acquisition in Canada for many years, and as marketplace value is driven by scale, enabled them to build up the leadership position they have today.
Interesting. I live in BC and Kijiji definitely isn't as dominant as Craigslist here. It's common to find jobs, second hand goods, and cars on Craigslist. I haven't heard anyone refer to Kijiji for anything here. Quite different from ON where Kijiji does seem to have the dominance that the article referred to.
In live in Quebec City. I used Kijiji to sell my car a few years ago and it still is the site I use to sell stuff. Reading this article made me go to Craigslist to see if it was any better now. Nope. I needed to click a dozen times to get to the french version for Quebec City. Nobody there. No photos in the lists? Move on.<p>Before that, I was literally thinking "CraigsList still exists?". I guess so, my Mac autocorrects CraigsList but does not have Kijiji in its dictionary... :)
Vancouver must be one of the exceptions to this. I'm from Winnipeg, which uses only Kijiji, and recently moved to Vancouver. When I was looking for an apartment, I tried Kijiji and didn't find much at all, after talking to some people I know from Vancouver, they told me to try CraigsList and that's where all the posts were. I actually prefer the cleaner interface though, Kijiji is quite cluttered in comparison.
Here in Alberta Kijiji is King. I remember going to the US and telling my boss that we should look for used stuff of Kijiji. All I got was a blank stare.<p>On a sidenote, Kijiji should make their Android app better.