eBay have announced that Gumtree, the classified ads site is to launch in the US. This isn’t just doubling up on Kijiji the classified ads company which is part of the eBay family, but triple coverage as they also own a minority stake in Craigslist, another classified ads website.
Gumtree has initially been launched in three US cities, Chicago, New York and Boston, all three of which are covered by Craigslist and Kijiji. In the past Gumtree has been assumed to be Kijiji in the UK (and other territories) but simply branded by another name in a similar manner to Doorone is the UK branding for Shopping.com. This has now been shown not to be the case as the Gumtree brand steps up to the plate to compete.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, will the three sites appeal to different market segments or will they really be in a head to head battle to establish which brand becomes the market leader?
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Gumtree is a bit of a sore spot with a lot of Australian sellers. The Gumtree site has some extremely explicit material on it (people looking for other people to do things they’re very happy to describe in detail, along with photographs). eBay Australia sellers sometimes get their listings pulled if the lingerie model stock photo they use has a bit of areola visible in the photograph OR if the image is obviously retouched so as NOT to show areolae or various other forbidden things, and yet eBay is happy to link to Gumtree from their front page…
Its a funny old world 😉
I have had an advert on the JoBerg Gumtree site for a year or more now :
https://johannesburg.gumtree.co.za/johannesburg/42/9528342.html
Yet, eBay don’t like ‘chex still, but Paypal and Gumtree do 😉