Last week at Live, eBay’s classified ads site Kijiji celebrated their first birthday by giving away bags of popcorn on the exhibition floor. The site now has four million users in north America, and General Manager Janet Bannister promised, “we listen intently to our community and are currently working on several innovative features and customer-focused improvements that will enhance the Kijiji experience.”
Kijiji has popular classifieds categories such as For Sale, Housing, Cars & Vehicles, Jobs, Pets, Services and Personals. In addition to the U.S., Kijiji has online communities in Canada, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan and Taiwan.
Meanwhile, PayPal are celebrating their tenth anniversary with a special microsite detailing the history of the company; the video interviews are particularly worth a look, especially to see JD looking relaxed.
However, rather quieter of late has been eBay partner Skype: they were not in evidence at all at Live, dispite plenty of empty floor space in the exhibition hall which could have easily accomodated them. I heard a rumour that this was due to “an internal issue”, but no more details than that: one has to wonder if Skype CEO Josh Silverman’s insistance that the relationship between Skype and eBay is as strong as ever is something akin to Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford’s Times ad to say they weren’t getting divorced.
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It’s especially strange as Skype were at DevCon the three days before Live! kicked off so it’s not like they had to travel far…. just from what turned into the PS Lounge down the hall to the exhibition hall – maybe a five minute stroll at most!
Strange indeed… eBay has flushed $2.5 billion down the toilet because of Skype, and they can’t even get them to show up at an event like this? For that kind of money, you’d think they could get them to roll over, bark, fetch the newspaper and slippers, and heel on command!
Silverman’s repeated statements about how wonderful things are between eBay and Skype remind me of “the lady doth protest too much”… especially when he’s the only one saying it, and no one at eBay has anything to say.
Here’s more on the issue:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/13/paypal_skype_glitch_reports/
I’m sure it’s just another way to gain revenue, since all the millions of Buy.coms ads, (which were raising the listing count, to throw off shareholders), were listed for FREE. Had their millions of listings, not been in the count, it would have been a TRUE count and would be millions less. Shareholders would then start to wonder, what was up at ebay or what has changed lately and it’s not hard to find, that sellers are upset, if you look through the latest articles.