After eBay announced it had acquired a 25% stake in Craigslist.com (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m08/i13/s01), the MSNBC.com news site announced the creation of MSNBC Classifieds. MSNBC calls the site a "comprehensive online trading post rivaling the combined print classifieds of newspapers nationwide." But it appears the site is merely a portal page to other sites, including eBay.

Users can browse online classifieds in five categories: Jobs, Real Estate, Cars, Personals, Travel and Merchandise, and the site said it has partnered with CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, eBay, HomeGain.com, Match.com and Expedia.com. A search for merchandise brings users to results page on eBay, and a search for homes brings users to HomeGain.com.

Some sellers look for local buyers when they have hard-to-package or hard-to-ship items, or when they want a face-to-face transaction. It looks like the battle for "local" selling is heating up, but MSNBC Classifieds is avoiding building its own infrastructure.

Meanwhile, CityXpress is offers an online-auction platform for newspapers (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m07/i26/s03) and is expanding into online classifieds, and AdPay provides newspapers with online classifieds capabilities (http://www.adpay.com). Local classifieds site LiveDeal (http://www.livedeal.com) has acquired over 500,000 monthly buyers and sellers in less than a year and is currently free to sellers and buyers.

It's to be determined whether the new MSNBC classifieds will bring significant traffic to eBay.

http://classifieds.msnbc.com