The blogoweb is buzzing with the news of TradeMe, New Zealand’s most popular site, not coincidentally an eBay knock-off, being acquired for a staggering $400 million.

TradeMe has 1.2MM members, which, of course, is considerable, but the amount is really so out of whack that one has to wonder how this money can be made back. Considering this and NBC’s acquisition of iVillage for $600 million, Ruper Murdoch looks like a genius for what he did with MySpace.

Now, New Zealand’s population, according to Statistics New Zealand is 4,128,420 people. That not adults or households, just people.

In my previous post about localized web I made the point that localized web services make a lot of sense. What’s really interesting here is that eBay, despite having been present in NZ since 2001, really isn’t even close to the reach of TradeMe. And there’s no language barrier — just a distinct culture. Just like in Quebec it’s the case with Lespac in Quebec, TradeMe is taking over classifieds too (as found by read/write web).

Google’s latest zeitgeist for NZ is from November 2005. TradeMe is first, but there’s also NZ Dating and Hi5 that caught my eye. Hi5 is not getting enough link love, it’s a social networking site with about the same number of members as MySpace, and nzdating is quite interesting as well. More on that later.

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