One of the more recent catalysts to start this site, and so receiving the dubious honour of being the first post is kijiji.com. When I first saw kijiji.com ads online I assumed it was an horribly misguided startup living in 2001 throwing their money away on a badly branded craigslist clone. I was basically right, except the year was 2008 and the startup was in fact eBay.com

Now kijiji (no capitals here folks) has proven two things.

1) Unreadable unpronounceable domains using Swahili [seriously - it means 'village' supposedly] terms as their name can grab market share.

2) 1. is only possible if a site like eBay throws 10s of Millions of $$$ at branding a blatant craiglist knockoff by buying every keyword under the sun for a period of months.

An entertaining corollary to this is that the name was clearly considered too weird for the Asian subcontinent, and thus Kijiji India is now a classic TDCWA – quikr.com (no ‘c’, no ‘e’)

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