LoQUo

» see loquo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ubaldo Huerta was a programmer in Barcelona who looked at Craigslist in San Francisco around 2002 and could not find the Spanish equivalent, because there was not one. LoQUo was the answer. Gray links on a white page, one section per city, categories that ran from housing and jobs down to personals, and no charge to post anything. It spread out of Barcelona into the rest of Spain and then into a handful of other European countries, and for a stretch in the mid-2000s it was simply where you went if you needed a room.

On 18 May 2005 it was acquired by Kijiji, the classifieds arm eBay had set up to do exactly this kind of buying. Spanish coverage of the years that followed is consistent about what happened next: eBay applied a commercial policy heavy enough that the free-and-plain quality people had come for started to drain out, and the opening it left got filled. Milanuncios had launched the same year, run out of a house by a handful of people, and it took the space.

By 2012 eBay was closing its other Spanish classifieds property, eBay Anuncios, and Milanuncios was doing double the traffic of its nearest competitor. LoQUo kept running for four more years as a small property inside a large company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what ebay bought ~

Kijiji was eBay's attempt to own local classifieds worldwide without turning them into auctions, and its method was purchase rather than construction. LoQUo in Spain was one of a set. The pattern repeated in enough countries that it has its own shape in this graveyard: buy the local site, hold it, then close it when the portfolio gets reviewed.

The closing announcement came from the LoQUo team's own blog on 17 June 2016 and was signed off in the name of the eBay Classifieds Group. It said the group aimed to offer the best classifieds portals in the world, and then it said this one would close on 31 July.

~ the ugliest page in spain ~

Spanish business press has written about Milanuncios more than once under headlines about the most boring design in the sector, and the joke lands because the plainness was the product. Classified ads are a page of text you scan quickly. Every attempt to improve that with photography and cards and filters made the scan slower. LoQUo understood this first in Spain and then lost to a competitor that understood it slightly longer.

~ after the ads stopped ~

No new listings could be posted from 1 July 2016. Existing ones ran until their own expiry and then stopped renewing. The archive shows a working ten-kilobyte homepage on 16 July, and by October a different page roughly twice that size, headed ¡Hasta pronto!, telling anyone who arrived that LoQUo had stopped working on 31 July 2016. That goodbye page stayed up and reachable through 2018, longer than most companies bother. In November 2018 the domain began redirecting, and today loquo.com does not resolve at all.

Turkey never lost its version of this. Sahibinden opened in 2000 and is still where anyone here looks first for a car or an apartment, running on the same plain rows of text LoQUo used. The difference between the two countries is not that one built a better classifieds site. It is that nobody bought the Turkish one.

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